









f -A S 

me'- 







'•-;? 35^, 



iifiiiliSlii; 











< o 




«^_^^^^ ■ /„A^(?^:', \ ,/'' *'"^'* 



\"-T/.^T'y^ X"?^^'\'^'' %-?.?.^o- 













0' s»--% <^ -^ 





^ " • «- cv 

0^ 'o »?v^,« ^ 



^> „^ "^t.. . 


















.<•' 








/ '',7 




A BUCKING BRONCHO 



r> -^ 



THE WEST 



FROM A CAR-WINDOW 



BY 



/■ 



RICHARD HARDING DAVIS 

AriHOU OK "VAX BIBBER AND OTHERS" ETC. 



ILLUSTRATED 



^ 








HARPER 



NEW YORK 
BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 
1892 



WASHiN^ 



1/ 

Copyright, 1892, by Harper & Brothers. 
All rights reserved. 






TO 

M. K. J. 

OF " 

THE SEVENTH INFANTRY 



^ 



CONTENTS 



FROM SAN ANTONIO TO CORPUS CHRISTI 

OUR TROOPS ON THE BORDER 

AT A NEW MINING CAMP . 

A THREE-YEAR-OLD CITY 

RANCH LIFE IN TEXAS . 

ON AN INDIAN RESERVATION 

A CIVILIAN AT AN ARMY POST 

THE HEART OF THE GREAT DIVIDE 



PAGK 
3 

27 
59 
93 
121 
151 
1S5 
215 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIOISrS 



PAG 15 

A Bucking Broncho Frontispiece 

Headpiece 3 

Rangers in Camp 9 

'■'■ Remember the Alamo r 19 

Trumpeter Tyler 29 

Captain Francis H. Ilardie, G Troop, Third United States Cavalry 37 

Water 48 

The Mexican Guide 49 

Third Cavalry Troopers — Searching a Suspected Revolutionist . . 53 

Mining Camp on the Range Above Creede 60 

Creede 63 

How Land is Claimed for Building — Planks Nailed Together and 

Resting 0)i Four Stumps 66 

The " Holy Moses " 3line 69 

Debatable Ground — A Warning to Trespassers 73 

A Mining Camp Court-house 75 

SJiaft of a Mine 79 

Valuable Real Estate 83 

Upper Creede 87 

Oklahoma City on tlie Day of the Opening 94 

Five Daiis After the Opening 97 

Four Weeks After the Opening 101 

Captain D. F. Stiles 105 

Post-office, April 22, 1889 108 



List of Illustrations 

PAGK 

Post-office, M/ 4, 1890 Ill 

Oklahoma City To-day — Main Broadway 115 

The Ranch-house on the King Ranch, the Largest Range Owned by 

One Individual in the United States 1 23 

A Shattered Idol 127 

Snapping a Rope on a Horse's Foot 130 

Ililliiigdon Ranch 133 

Fixing a Break in the Wire Fence 13*7 

Gathering the Rope 141 

Reaction Equals Aclioti . 145 

7ail-piece , . . 148 

Tlie Cheyenne Type 152 

Big Bull 155 

One of Williamson'' s Stages 150 

The Beef Issue at Anadarko 163 

Indian Boy and Pinto Pony 169 

A Kiotva Maiden 1 75 

A One-company Post at Oklahoma City . .187 

The Omnipotent Bugler , , . 191 

United States Military Post at San Antonio ....... 195 

United States Cavalryman in Full Dress 199 

Utiited Stafes Military Post — Infantry Parade 203 

Fort Houston, at San Antonio — Officers' Quarters 207 

The Barracks, Fort Houston 210 

Gateway of the Garden of the Gods, and Pike'' s Peak .... 217 

Within the Gates, Garden of the Gods 223 

Polo Above the Snow-line at Colorado Springs 227 

Mount of the Holy Cross 233 

Pike'' s Peak from Colorado Springs 239 



i 



I 

FROM SAN ANTONIO TO CORPUS CHRISTI 






...ii.*^; 



V .$rz. 



:Kard[ Hexrding Davis 



FROM SAN ANTONIO TO CORPUS CHRISTI 




T is somewhat disturbing to one who visits the 
West for the first time with the purpose of 
writing of it, to read on the back of a rail- 
road map, before he reaches Harrisburg, that 
Texas "is one hundred thousand square miles larger 
than all the Eastern and Middle States, including Maryland 
and Delaware." It gives him a sharp sensation of loneli- 
ness, a wish to apologize to some one, and he is moved with 
a sudden desire to get out at the first station and take the 
next train back, before his presumption is discovered. He 
might possibly feel equal to the fact that Texas is " larger 
than all of the Eastern and Middle States," but this easy 
addition of one hundred thousand square miles, and the 
casual throwing in of Maryland and Delaware like potatoes 
on a basket for good measure, and just as though one or 
two States more or less did not matter, make him wish he 
had sensibly confined his observations to that part of the 
world bounded by Harlem and the Battery. 

If I could travel over the West for three years, I might 
write of it with authority ; but when my time is limited to 



TUe West from a Car - Window 

three months, I can only give impressions from a car-window 
point of view, and cannot dare to draw conclusions. I know 
that this is an evident and cowardly attempt to " hedge " 
at the very setting forth. But it is well to understand what 
is to follow. All that I may hope to do is to tell what 
impressed an Eastern man in a hurried trip through the 
Western States. I will try to describe what I saw in such 
a way that those who read may see as much as I saw with 
the eyes of one who had lived in the cities of the Eastern 
States, but the moral they draw must be their own, and can 
differ from mine as widely as they please. 

An Eastern man is apt to cross the continent for the first 
time with mixed sensations of pride at the size of his coun- 
try, and shame at his ignorance concerning it. He remem- 
bers guiltily how he has told that story of the Englishman 
who asks the American in London, on hearing he is from 
New York, if he knows his brother in Omaha, Nebraska. 
And as the Eastern man finds from the map of his own 
country that the letters of introduction he has accepted 
from intelligent friends are addressed to places one and two 
thousand miles apart, he determines to drop that story about 
the Englishman, and tell it hereafter at the expense of him- 
self and others nearer home. 

His first practical surprise perhaps will be when he dis- 
covers the speed and ease with which numerous States are 
passing under him, and that smooth road-beds and parlor- 
cars remain with him to the very borders of the West. The 
change of time will trouble him at first, until he gets nearer 
to Mexico, when he will have his choice of three separate 
standards, at which point he will cease winding his watch 
altogether, and devote his " twenty minutes for refresh- 
ments " to watching the conductor. But this minor and 

A. 



From San Antonio to Corpus Ckristi 

merely nominal change >Yill not distress liini half so seri- 
ously as will the sudden and actual disarrangement of his 
dinner hour from seven at night to two in the afternoon, 
though even this will become possible after he finds people 
in south-western Texas eating duck for breakfast. 

He will take his first lesson in the politics of Texas and 
of the rest of the West when he first offers a ten-dollar bill 
for a dollar's worth of something, and is given nine large 
round silver dollars in change. When he has twenty or 
more of these on his person, and finds that his protests are 
met with polite surprise, he understands that silver is a 
large and vital issue, and that the West is ready to suffer 
its minor disadvantages for the possible good to come. 

He will get his first wrong impression of the West 
through reading the head-lines of some of the papers, and 
from the class of books offered for sale on the cars and 
in the hotels and book -stores from St. Louis to Corpus 
Christi. These head -lines shock even a hardened news- 
paper man. But they do not represent the feeling of their 
readers, and in that they give a wrong and unfortunate im- 
pression to the visiting stranger. They told while I was in 
St. Louis of a sleighing party of twenty, of whom nine were 
instantly killed by a locomotive, and told it as flippantly as 
though it were a picnic ; but the accident itself was the one 
and serious comment of the day, and the horror of it seemed 
to have reached every class of citizen. 

It is rather more difficult to explain away the books. 
They are too obvious and too much in evidence to be acci- 
dental. To judge from them, one would imagine that Boc- 
caccio, Rabelais, Zola, and such things as Velvet Vice and 
Old Sleuth^ are all that is known to the South-west of lit- 
erature. It may be that the booksellers only keep them for 



The West from a Car - Window 

3 

their own perusal, but they might have something better 
for their customers. 

The ideas which the stay-at-home Eastern man obtains 
of the extreme borderland of Texas are gathered from vari- 
ous sources, principally from those who, as will all travellers, 
make as much of what they have seen as is possible, this 
much being generally to show the differences which exist 
between the places they have visited and their own home^ 
Of the similarities they say nothing. Or he has read of the 
bandits and outlaws of the Garza revolution, and he has seen 
the AVild West show of the Hon. William F. Cody. The 
latter, no doubt, surprised and delighted him very much. A 
mild West show, which would be equally accurate, would sur- 
prise him even more ; at least, if it w^as organized in the wild- 
est part of Texas between San Antonio and Corpus Christi. 

Wlien he leaves this first city and touches at the border 
of Mexico, at Laredo, and starts forth again across the prai- 
rie of cactus and chaparral towards " Corpus," he feels as- 
sured that at last he is done with parlor-cars and civiliza- 
tion ; that he is about to see the picturesque and lawless 
side of the Texan existence, and that he has taken his life 
in his hands. He will be the more readily convinced of 
this when the young man with the broad shoulders and 
sun-browned face and wide sombrero in the seat in front 
raises the car-window, and begins to shoot splinters out of 
the passing telegraph poles with the melancholy and list- 
less air of one who is performing a casual divertisement. 
But he will be better informed when the Chicago drummer 
has risen hurriedly, with a pale face, and has reported 
what is going on to the conductor, and he hears that digni- 
tary say, complacently : " Sho ! that's only ' Will ' Scheeley 
practisin' ! He's a dep'ty sheriff." 



From San Antonio to Corpus Christi 

He will learn in time that the only men on the borders 
of Texas who are allowed to wear revolvers are sheriffs^ 
State agents in charge of prisoners, and the Texas Rangers, 
and that whenev^er he sees a man so armed he may as surely 
assume that he is one of these as he may know that in New 
York men in gray uniforms, with leather bags over their 
shoulders, are letter-carriers. The revolver is the Texan 
officer's badge of office ; it corresponds to the New York 
policeman's shield ; and he toys with it just as the Broad- 
way policeman juggles his club. It is quite as harmless as 
a toy, and almost as terrible as a weapon. 

This will grieve the " tenderfoot " who goes through 
the West " heeled," and ready to show that though 
he is from the effete East, he is able to take care of 
himself. 

It was first brought home to me as I was returning from 
the border, where I had been with the troops who were 
hunting for Garza, and was waiting at a little station on the 
prairie to take the train for Corpus Christi. I was then 
told politely by a gentleman who seemed of authority 
that if I did not take off that pistol I would be fined 
twenty-five dollars, or put in jail for twenty days. I ex- 
plained to him where I had been, and that my baggage 
was at " Corpus," and that I had no other place to carry it. 
At which he apologized, and directed a deputy sheriff, who 
was also going to Corpus Christi, to see that I was not ar- 
rested for carrying a deadly weapon. 

This, I think, illustrates a condition of things in darkest 
Texas which may give a new point of view to the Eastern 
mind. It is possibly something of a revelation to find that 
instead of every man protecting himself, and the selection 
of the fittest depending on who is " quickest on the trig- 



The West from a Car - Window 

ger," lie has to have an officer of the law to protect him if 
he tries to be a law unto himself. 

While I was on the border a deputy sheriff named Rufus 
Glover, who was acting as a guide for Captain Chase, of 
the Third Cavalry, was fired upon from an ambush by per- 
sons unknown, and killed. A Mexican brought the news 
of this to our camp the night after the murder, and de- 
scribed the manner of the killing, as it had occurred, at 
great length and with much detail. 

Except that he was terribly excited, and made a very 
dramatic picture as he stood in the fire-light and moon- 
light and acted the murder, it did not interest me, as I con- 
sidered it to be an unfortunate event of very common oc- 
currence in that part of the world. But the next morning 
every ranchman and cowboy and Texas Ranger and soldier 
we chanced to meet on the trail to Captain Hunter's camp 
took up the story of the murder of liufus Glover, and told 
and retold what some one else had told him, with desperate 
earnestness and the most wearying reiteration. And on 
the day following, when the papers reached us, we found 
that reporters had been sent to the scene of the murder 
from almost every part of south-west Texas, many of whom 
had had to travel a hundred miles, and then ride thirty 
more through the brush before they reached it. How 
many city editors in New York City would send as far as 
that for anything less important than a railroad disaster or 
a Johnstown flood ? 

On the fourth day after the murder of this in no way 
celebrated or unusually popular individual, the people of 
Duval County, in wdiich he had been killed, called an indig- 
nation meeting, and passed resolutions condemning the 
county officials for not suppressing crime, and petitioning 



From San Antonto to Corpus Christi 

the Governor of the State to send the Rangers to put an 
end to such lawlessness — that is, the killing of one man in 
an almost uninhabited country. The committee who were 
to present this petition passed through Laredo on the way 
to see the Governor. Laredo is one hundred miles from 
the scene of the murder, and in an entirely different county ; 
but there the popular indignation and excitement were so 
great that another mass-meeting was called, and another 
petition was made to the Governor, in which the resolutions 
of Duval County were endorsed. I do not know what his 
Excellency did about it. There ^vere in the Tombs in New 
York when I left that city twenty-live men awaiting trial 
for murder, and that crime was so old a story in the Bend 
and along the East Side that the most morbid newspaper 
reader skipped the scant notice the papers gave of them. 
It would seem from this that the East should reconstruct a 
new Wild West for itself, in which a single murder sends 
two committees of indignant citizens to the State capital 
to ask the Governor what he intends to do about it. 

But the West is not wholly reconstructed. There are 
still the Texas Rangers, and in them the man from the 
cities of the East will find the picturesqueness of the Wild 
West show and its happiest expression. If they and the 
sight of cowboys roping cattle do not satisfy him, nothing 
else will. The Rangers are a semi-militia, semi-military or- 
ganization of long descent, and with the most brilliant rec- 
ord of border warfare. At the present time their work is 
less adventurous than it was in the day of Captain McNelly, 
but the spirit of the first days has only increased with time. 

The Rangers enlist for a year under one of eight cap- 
tains, and the State pays them c dollar a day and supplies 
them with rations and ammunition. They bring with them 

11 



The West J^rom a Car - Window 

their own horse, blanket, and rifle, and revolver ; they wear 
no regular uniform or badge of any sort, except the belt of 
cartridges around the waist. The mounted police of the 
gold days in the Australian bush, and the mounted con- 
stabulary of the Canadian border are perhaps the only 
other organizations of a like nature and with similar duties. 
Their headquarters are wherever their captain finds water, 
and, if he is fortunate, fuel and shade ; but as the latter two 
are difficult to find in common in the five hundred square 
miles of brush along the Rio Grande, they are content with 
a tank of alkali water alone. 

There are about twenty men in each of the eight troops, 
and one or two of them are constantly riding away on de- 
tached service — to follow the trail of a Mexican bandit or a 
horse-thief, or to suppress a family feud. The Rangers' 
camps look much like those of gypsies, with their one 
wagon to carry the horses' feed, the ponies grazing at the 
ends of the lariats, the big Mexican saddles hung over the 
nearest barb fence, and the blankets covering the ground 
and marking the hard beds of the night before. These 
men are the especial pride of General Mabry, the Adjutant- 
general of Texas, who was with them the first time I met 
them, sharing their breakfast of bacon and coffee under the 
shade of the only tree within ten miles. He told me some 
very thrilling stories of their deeds and personal meetings 
with the desperadoes and " bad " men of the border ; but 
when he tried to lead Captain Brooks into relating a few of 
his own adventures, the result was a significant and com- 
plete failure. Significant, because big men cannot tell of 
the big things they do as well as other people can — they 
are handicapped by having to leave out the best part ; and 
because Captain Brooks's version of the same story the 

12 



From San Antonio to Corpus Christi 

general had told me, with all the necessary detail, would 
be : " Well, we got word they were hiding in a ranch down 
in Zepata County, and we went down there and took 'era— 
which they were afterwards hung." 

The fact that he had had three fingers shot off as he 
" took 'em " was a detail he scorned to remember, especially 
as he could shoot better without these members than the 
rest of his men, who had only lost one or two. 

Boots above the knee and leather leggings, a belt three 
inches wide with two rows of brass-bound cartridges, and a 
slanting sombrero make a man appear larger than he really 
is ; but the Rangers were the largest men I saw in Texas, 
the State of big men. And some of them were remarkably 
handsome in a sun-burned, broad-shouldered, easy, manly 
wa3\ They were also somewhat shy with the strangers, lis- 
tening very intently, but speaking little, and then in a slow, 
gentle voice ; and as they spoke so seldom, they seemed to 
think what they had to say was too valuable to spoil by 
profanity. 

When General Mabry found they would not tell of their 
adventures, he asked them to show how they could shoot ; 
and as this was something they could do, and not some- 
thing already done, they went about it as gleefully as school- 
boys at recess doing " stunts." They placed a board, 
a foot wide and two feet high, some sixty feet off in the 
prairie, and Sheriff Scheeley opened hostilities by whipping 
out his revolver, turning it in the air, and shooting, with 
the sights upside down, into the bull's-eye of the impromptu 
target. He did this without discontinuing what he was 
saying to me, but rather as though he were punctuating his 
remarks with audible-commas. 

Then he said, " I didn't think you Rangers would let a 



The West from a Car - Window 

little one-penny sheriff get in the first shot on you." He 
could atford to say this, because he had been a Ranger him- 
self, and his brother Joe was one of the best captains the 
Rangers have had ; and he and all of his six brothers are 
over six feet high. But the taunt produced an instantane- 
ous volley from every man in the company ; they did not 
take the trouble to rise, but shot from where they happened 
to be sitting or lying and talking together, and the air rang 
with the reports and a hundred quick vibrating little gasps, 
like the singing of a wire string when it is tightened on a 
banjo. 

They exhibited some most wonderful shooting. They 
shot with both hands at the same time, with the hammer 
underneath, holding the rifle in one hand, and never, when 
it was a revolver they were using, with a glance at the 
sights. They would sometimes fire four shots from a 
Winchester between the time they had picked it up from 
the ground and before it had nestled comfortably against 
their shoulder. They also sent one man on a pony racing 
around a tree about as thick as a man's leg, and were dis- 
satisfied because he only put four out of six shots into it. 
Then General Mabry, who seemed to think I did not fully 
appreciate what they were doing, gave a Winchester rifle 
to Captain Brooks and myself, and told us to show which 
of us could first put eight shots into the target. 

It seems that to shoot a Winchester you have to pull a 
trigger one way and work a lever backward and forward; 
this would naturally suggest that there are three movements 
— one to throw out the empty shell, one to replace it with 
another cartridge, and the third to explode this cartridge. 
Captain Brooks, as far as I could make out from the sound, 
used only one movement for his entire eight shots. As I 

14 



From San Antonio to Corpus Ckristi 

guessed, the trial was more to show Captain Brooks's quick- 
ness rather than his marksmanship, and I paid no attention to 
the target, but devoted myself assiduously to manipulat- 
ing the lever and trigger, aiming blankly at the prairie. 
When I had fired two shots into sj^ace, the captain had put 
his eight into the board. They sounded, as they went off, 
like fire-crackers well started in a barrel, and mine, in com- 
parison, like minute-guns at sea. The Rangers, I found, 
after I saw more of them, could shoot as rapidly with a 
revolver as with a rifle, and had become so expert with the 
smaller weapon that instead of pressing the trigger for 
each shot, they would pull steadily on it, and snap the 
hammer until the six shots were exhausted. 

San Antonio is the oldest of Texan cities, and possesses 
historical and picturesque show-places which in any other 
country but our own would be visited by innumerable 
American tourists prepared to fall down and worship. The 
citizens of San Antonio do not, as a rule, appreciate the 
historical values of their city ; they are rather tired of them. 
They would prefer you should look at the new Post-oiBce 
and the City Hall, and ride on the cable road. But the 
missions which lie just outside of the city are what will 
bring the Eastern man or woman to San Antonio, and not 
the new water-works. There are four of these missions, 
the two largest and most interesting being the Mission de 
la Conception, of which the corner-stone was laid in 1730, 
and the Mission San Jose, the carving, or what remains of 
it, in the latter being wonderfully rich and effective. The 
Spaniards were forced to abandon the missions on account 
of the hostility of the Indians, and they have been occupied 
at different times since by troops and bats, and left to the 
mercies of the young men from "Rochester, N. Y.," and 

15 



The West from a Car - Window 

the young women from " Dallas, Texas," who have carved 
their immortal names over their walls just as freely as 
though they were the pyramids of Egypt or Blarney Castle. 
San Antonio is a great place for invalids, on account of its 
moderate climate, and a most satisfactory place in which 
to spend a week or two in the winter whether one is an in- 
valid or not. There is the third largest army post in the 
country at the edge of the city, where there is much to see 
and many interesting people to know, and there is a good 
club, and cock-lighting on Sunday, and a first-rate theatre 
all the week. At night the men sit outside of the hotels, 
and the plazas are filled with Mexicans and their open-air 
restaurants, and the lights of these and the brigandish ap- 
pearance of those who keep them are very unlike anything 
one may see at home. 

All that the city really needs now is a good hotel and a 
more proper pride in its history and the monuments to it. 
The man who seems to appreciate this best is William Cor- 
ner, whose book on San Antonio is a most valuable histori- 
cal authority. 

A few years ago one would have said that San Antonio 
was enjoying a boom. But you cannot use that expression 
now, for the Western men have heard that a boom, no mat- 
ter how quickly it rises, often comes down just as quickly, 
and so forcibly that it makes a hole in the ground where 
castles in the air had formerly stood. So if you wish to 
please a AVestern man by speaking well of his city (and 
you cannot please him more in any other way), you must 
say that it is enjoying a " steady, healthy growth." San 
Antonio is enjoying a steady, healthy growth. 

It is quite as impossible to write comprehensively of 
south-western Texas in one article as it is to write such an 



From San Antonio to Corpus Christi 

article and say nothing of tlie Alamo. And the Alamo, in 
the event of any hasty reader's possible objection, is not 
ancient history. It is no more ancient history than love is 
an old story, for nothing is ancient and nothing is old which 
every new day teaches something that is fine and beautiful 
and brave. The Alamo is to the South-west what Inde- 
pendence Hall IS to the United States, and Bunker Hill to 
the East ; but the pride of it belongs to every American, 
whether he lives in Texas or in Maine. The battle of 
the Alamo was the event of greatest moment in the war 
between Mexico and the Texans, when Santa Anna was 
President, and the Texans were fighting for their independ- 
ence. And the stone building to which the Mexicans laid 
siege, and in which the battle was fought, stands to-day 
facing a plaza in the centre of San Antonio. 

There are hideous wooden structures around it, and oth- 
ers not so hideous — modern hotels and the new Post-office, 
on which the mortar is hardly yet dry. But in spite of 
these the grace and dignity which the monks gave it in 1774, 
raise it above these modern efforts that tower above it, and 
dwarf them. They are collecting somewhat slowly a fund 
to pay for the erection of a monument to the heroes of the 
Alamo. As though they needed a monument, with these 
battered walls still standing and the marks of the bullets 
on the casements ! Xo architect can build better than 
that. Xo architect can introduce that feature. The 
architects of the xVlamo were building the independence 
of a State as wide in its boundaries as the German Em- 
pire. 

The story of the Alamo is a more than thrice-told one, and 
Sidney Lanier has told it so well that whoever would write 
of it must draw on him for much of their material, and 



The West from a Car - Window 

must accept his point of view. Bat it cannot be told too 
often, even though it is spoiled in the telling. 

On the 23d of February, 1836, General Santa Anna him- 
self, with four thousand Mexican soldiers, marched into 
the town of San Antonio. In the old mission of the Ala- 
mo were the town's only defenders, one hundred and forty- 
five men, under Captain Travis, a young man twenty-eight 
years old. With him were Davy Crockett, who had crossed 
over from his own State to help those who were freeing 
theirs, and Colonel Bowie (who gave his name to a knife, 
which name our government gave later to a fort), who was 
wounded and lying on a cot. 

Their fortress and quarters and magazine was the mission, 
their artillery fourteen mounted pieces, but there was little 
ammunition. Santa Anna demanded unconditional surren- 
der, and the ansv/er was ten days of dogged defence, and 
skirmishes by day and sorties for food and water by night. 
The Mexicans lost heavily during the first days of the siege, 
but not one inside of the Alamo was killed. Early in the 
week Travis had despatched couriers for help, and the de- 
fenders of the mission were living in the hope of re-enforce- 
ments ; but four days passed, and neither couriers returned 
nor re -enforcements came. On the fourth day Colonel 
Fannin with three hundred men and four pieces of artillery 
started forth from Goliad, but put back again for want of 
food and lack of teams. The garrison of the Alamo never 
knew of this. On the 1st of March Captain John W. 
Smith, who has found teams, and who has found rations, 
brings an offering of thirty -two men from Gonzales, and 
leads them safely into the fort. They have come with 
forced marches to their own graves ; but they do not know 
that, and the garrison, now one hundred and seventy-two 

18 



Fram San Antonio to Corpus Christi 

strong, against four thousand Mexicans, continues its des- 
perate sorties and its desperate defence. 

On the 3d of March, 1836, there is a cessation in the 
bombardment, and Captain Travis draws his men up into 
single rank and takes his place in front of them. 

He tells them that he has deceived them with hopes of 
re-enforcements — false hopes based on false promises of help 
from the outside — but he does not blame those who failed 
him ; he makes excuses for them ; they have tried to reach 
him, no doubt, but have been killed on the way. Sidney 
Lanier quotes this excusing of those who had deserted 
him at the very threshold of death as best showing the 
fineness of Travis, and the poet who has judged the soldier 
so truly has touched here one of the strongest points of 
this story of great heroism. 

Captain Travis tells them that all that remains to them 
is the choice of their death, and that they have but to de- 
cide in which manner of dying they will best serve their 
country. They can surrender and be shot down merciless- 
ly, they can make a sortie and be butchered before they 
have gained twenty yards, or they can die fighting to the 
last, and killing their enemies until that last comes. 

He gives them their choice, and then stooping, draws a 
line with the point of his sword in the ground from the left 
to the right of the rank. 

*' And now," he says, " every man who is determined to 
remain here and to die with me w'ill come to me across that 
line." 

Tapley Holland was the first to cross. He jumped it 
with a bound, as though it were a Rubicon. *' I am ready 
to die for my country," he said. 

And then all but one man, named Rose, marched over to 

21 



The West from a Car - Window 

the other side. Colonel Bowie, lying wounded in his cot, 
raised himself on his elbow. " Boys," he said, " don't leave 
me. Won't some of you carry me across ?" 

And those of the sick who could walk rose from the 
bunks and tottered across the line; and those who could 
not walk were carried. Rose, who could speak Spanish, 
trusted to this chance to escape, and scaling the wall of the 
Alamo, dropped into a ditch on the other side, and crawled, 
hidden by the cactus, into a place of safety. Through him 
we know what happened before that final day came. He 
had his reward. 

Three days after this, on the morning of the 6th of 
March, Santa Anna brought forward all of his infantry, 
supported by his cavalry, and stormed the fortress. The 
infantry came up on every side at once in long, black solid 
rows, bearing the scaling-ladders before them, and encour- 
aged by the press of great numbers about them. 

But the band inside the mission drove them back, and 
those who held the ladders dropped them on the ground 
and ran against the bayonets of their comrades. A second 
time they charged into the line of bullets, and the second 
time they fell back, leaving as many dead at the foot of the 
ladders as there were standing at bay w^ithin the walls. But 
at the third trial the ladders are planted, and Mexicans 
after Mexicans scale them, and jump down into the pit in- 
side, hundreds and hundreds of them, to be met with bul- 
lets and then by bayonet-thrusts, and at last with desperate 
swinging of the butt, until the little band grows smaller 
and weaker, and is driven up and about and beaten down 
and stamped beneath the weight of overwhelming and un- 
ending numbers. They die fighting on their knees, hack- 
ing up desperately as they are beaten and pinned down by 



From San Antonio to Corpus Christi 

a dozen bayonets, Bowie leaning on his elbow and shooting 
from his cot, Crockett fighting like a panther in the angle 
of the church wall, and Travis with his back against the 
wall to the west. The one hundred and seventy-two men 
who had held four thousand men at bay for two sleepless 
weeks are swept away as a dam goes that has held back a 
flood, and the Mexicans open the church doors from the in- 
side and let in their comrades and the sunshine that shows 
them horrid heaps of five hundred and twenty-two dead 
Mexicans, and five hundred more wounded. 

There are no wounded among the Texans ; of the one 
hundred and seventy -two who were in the Alamo there 
are one hundred and seventy-two dead. 

With an example like this to follow, it was not difficult 
to gain the independence of Texas ; and whenever Sam Hous- 
ton rode before his men, crying, " Remember the Alamo !" 
the battle was already half won. 

It was not a cry wholly of revenge, I like to think. It 
was rather the holding up of the cross to the crusaders, and 
crying, " By this sign we conquer." It w^as a watchword 
to remind men of those who had suffered and died that 
their cause might live. 

And so, when we leave Texas, we forget the little things 
that may have tried our patience and understanding there, 
W3 /orgive the desolation of the South-west, its cactus and 
d_ying cattle, we forget the dinners in the middle of the 
day and the people's passing taste in literature, and we re- 
member the Alamo, 



II 

OUR TROOPS ON THE BORDER 



Our Troops on the Border 



II 



OUR TROOPS ON THE BORDER 




ROLLING, jerky train made up of several 
freight and one passenger car, the latter equal- 
ly divided, "For Whites" and "For Negroes" 
— which in the south-west of Texas reads 
" Mexicans " — dropped my baggage at Pena station, and 
rolled off across the prairie, rocking from side to side 
like a line of canal -boats in a rough sea. It seemed like 
the last departing link of civilization. There was the 
freight station itself ; beyond the track a leaky water-tank, 
a wooden store surrounded with piles of raw, foul-smelling 
hides left in exchange for tobacco and meal, a few thatched 
Mexican huts, and the prairie. That stretched on every side 
to the horizon, level and desolate, and rising and falling in 
the heat. Beneath was a red sandy soil covered with cac- 
tus and bunches of gray, leafless brush, marked with the 
white skeletons of cattle, and overhead a sun at white heat, 
and heavily moving buzzards wheeling in circles or bal- 
ancing themselves with outstretched wings between the hot 
sky above and the hot, red soil below. 

Across this desert came slowly Trumpeter Tyler, of Troop 
G, Third Cavalry, mounted on the white horse which only 
trumpeters affect, and as white as the horse itself from the 
dust of the trail. He did not look like the soldiers I had 

27 



The West from a Car - Windoio 

seen at San Antonio. His blue sliirt was wide open at the 
breast, his riding-breeches were bare at the knee, and the 
cactus and chaparral had torn his blouse into rags and rib- 
bons. He pushed his wide -brimmed hat back from his 
forehead and breathed heavily with the heat. Captain 
Hardie's camp, he panted, lay twenty-five miles to the west. 
He had come from there to see if the field tents and extra 
rations were ever going to arrive from the post, and as he 
had left, the captain had departed also with a detachment 
in search of Garza on a fresh trail. ''And he means to fol- 
low it," said Trumpeter Tyler, " if it takes him into Mex- 
ico." So it was doubtful whether the visitor from the East 
would see the troop commander for several days ; but if 
he nevertheless wished to push on to the camp. Trumpet- 
er Tyler would be glad to show him the way. Not only 
would he show him the way, but he would look over his 
kit for him, and select such things as the visitor would 
need in the brush. Not such things as the visitor might 
want, but such things as the visitor would need. For in 
the brush necessities become luxuries, and luxuries are rel- 
ics of an effete past and of places where tradition tells of 
pure water and changes of raiment, and, some say, even 
beds. Neither Trumpeter Tyler, nor Captain Francis H. 
Hardie, nor any of the officers or men of the eight troops 
of cavalry on field service in south-west Texas had seen such 
things for three long months of heat by day and cold by 
night, besides a blizzard of sleet and rain, that kept them 
trembling with cold for a fortnight. And it was for this 
reason that the visitor from the East chose to see the 
United States troops as they were in the field, and to 
tell about the way they performed their duty there, 
rather than as he found them at the posts, where there is 




^^^, 



r^V^A — 



TKUMPKTKR TYLER 



Our Troops on the Border 

at least a canteen and papers not more than a week 
old. 

Trumpeter Tyler ran his hand haughtily through what I 
considered a very sensibly-chosen assortment of indispensa- 
ble things, and selected a handful which he placed on one side. 

" You think I had better not take those ?" I suggested. 

"That's all you can take," said the trooper, mercilessly. 
" You must think of the horse." 

Then he led the way to the store, and pointed out the 
value of a tin plate, a tin cup, and an iron knife and fork, 
saddle-bags, leather leggings to keep off the needles of 
the cactus, a revolver, and a blanket. It is of interest to 
give Trumpeter Tyler's own outfit, as it was that of every 
other man in the troop, and was all that any one of them 
had had for two months. He carried it all on his horse, 
and it consisted of a blanket, an overcoat, a carbine, a feed- 
bag, lariat and iron stake, a canteen, saddle-bags filled with 
rations on one side and a change of under-clothing on 
the other, a shelter-tent. done up in a roll, a sword, and a 
revolver, with rounds of ammunition for it and the carbine 
worn in a belt around the waist. All of this, with the sad- 
dle, weighed about eighty pounds, and when the weight of a 
man is added to it, one can see that it is well, as Trumpeter 
Tyler suggested, to think of the horse. Troop G had been or- 
dered out for seven days' field service on the 15th of Decem- 
ber, and it was then the 24th of January, and the clothes and 
equipments they had had with them when they started at 
midnight from Fort Macintosh for that week of hard riding 
were all they had had with them since. But the hard riding- 
had continued. 

Trumpeter Tyler proved that day not only my guide, but 
a philosopher, and when night came on, a friend. He was 

31 



The IVest front a Car - Window 

very young, and came from Virginia, as his slow, lazy voice 
showed; and he had played, in his twenty-three years, the 
many parts of photographer, compositor, barber, cook, mu- 
sician, and soldier. He talked of these different callings as 
we walked our horses over the prairie, and, out of defer- 
ence to myself and my errand, of writing. He was a some- 
what general reader, and volunteered his opinion of the 
works of Rudyard Kipling, Laura Jean Libbey, Captain 
Charles King, and others with confident familiarity. He 
recognized no distinctions in literature ; they had all writ- 
ten a book, therefore they were, in consequence, in exactly 
the same class. 

Of Mr. Kipling he said, with an appreciative shake of the 
head, that " he knew the private soldier from way back ;" 
of Captain Charles King, that he wrote for the officers ; and 
of Laura Jean Libbey, that she was an authoress whose 
books he read " when there really wasn't nothing else to do." 
I doubt if one of Mr. Kipling's own heroes could have made 
as able criticisms. 

When night came on and the stars came out, Jne dropped 
the soldier shop and talked of religion and astronomy. The 
former, he assured me earnestly, was much discussed by the 
privates around the fire at night, which I could better be- 
lieve after I saw how near the stars get and how wide the 
world seems when there is only a blanket between you and 
the heavens, and when there is a general impression prevail- 
ing that you are to be shot at from an ambush in the morn- 
ing. Of astronomy he showed a very wonderful knowl- 
edge, and awakened my admiration by calling many stars 
by strange and ancient names — an admiration which was 
lessened abruptly when he confessed that he had been fol- 
lowing some other than the North Star for the last three 

32 



Our Troops- on the Border 

miles, and that we were lost. It was a warm night, and I 
was so tired with the twenty-five-miles ride on a Mexican 
saddle — which is as comfortable as a soap-box turned edges 
up — that the idea of lying out on the ground did not alarm 
me. But Trumpeter Tyler's honor was at stake. He had 
his reputation as a trailer to maintain, and he did so ably 
by lighting matches and gazing knowingly at the hoof-marks 
of numerous cattle, whose bones, I was sure, were already 
whitening on the plain or journeying East in a refrigerator- 
car, but which he assured me were still fresh, and must lead 
to the ranch near which the camp was pitched. And so, 
after four hours' aimless trailing through the chaparral, 
when only the thorns of the cactus kept us from falling- 
asleep off our horses, we stumbled into two smouldering 
fires, a ghostly row of Httle shelter-tents, and a tall figure 
in a long overcoat, who clicked a carbine and cried, " Halt, 
and dismount !" 

1 was somewhat doubtful of my reception in the absence 
of the captain, and waited, very wide awake now, while 
they consulted together in whispers, and then the sentry 
led me to one of the little tents and kicked a sleeping form 
violently, and told me to crawl in and not to mind reveille 
in the morning, but to sleep on as long as I wished. I did 
not know then that I had Trumpeter Tyler's bed, and that 
he was sleeping under a wagon, but I was gratefully con- 
scious of his " bunkie's " tucking me in as tenderly as 
though I were his son, and of his not sharing, but giving 
me more than my share of the blankets. And I went to 
sleep so quickly that it was not until the morning that I 
found what I had drowsily concluded must be the roots of 
trees under me, to be " bunkie's " sabre and carbine. 

The American private, as he showed himself during the 

o 33 



The West from a Car -Window 

three days in which I was his guest, and afterwards, when 
Captain Hardie had returned and we went scouting togeth- 
er, proved to be a most intelligent and unpicturesque indi- 
vidual. He was intelligent, because he had, as a rule, fol- 
lowed some other calling before he entered the service, and 
he was not picturesque, because he looked on " soldiering " 
merely as a means of livelihood, and had little or no patri- 
otic or sentimental feeling concerning it. This latter was 
not true of the older men. They had seen real war either 
during the rebellion or in the Indian campaigns, which are 
much more desperate affairs than the Eastern mind appre- 
ciates, and they were fond of the servic.e and proud of it. 
One of the corporals in G Troop, for instance, had been 
honorably discharged a year before with the rank of first 
sergeant, and had re-enlisted as a private rather than give 
up the service, of which he found he was more fond than 
he had imagined when he had left it. And in K Troop 
was an even more notable instance in a man who had been 
retired on three-fourths pay, having served his thirty years, 
and who had returned to the troop to act as Captain Hunt- 
er's " striker," or man of all w^ork, and who bore the mo- 
notony of the barracks and the hardships of field service 
rather than lose the uniform and the feeling of esiyrit de 
corps w^hich thirty years' service had made a necessity to 
him. 

But the raw recruit, or the man in his third or fourth 
year, as he expressed himself in the different army posts 
and among the companies 1 met on the field, looked upon 
his work from a purely business point of view. He had 
been before enlistment a clerk, or a compositor, a cowboy, 
a day -laborer, painter, blacksmith, book-canvasser, almost 
everything. In Captain Hardie's troop all of these were 

34 



Our Troops on the Border 

represented, and the average of intelligence was very high. 
Whether the most intelligent private is the best soldier is 
a much -discussed question which is not to be discussed 
here, but these men were intelligent and were good soldiers, 
although I am sure they were too independent in their 
thoughts, though not in their actions, to have suited an 
officer of the English or German army. That they are 
more carefully picked men than those found in the rank 
and lile of the British army can be proved from the fact 
that of those who apply for enlistment in the United States 
but twenty per cent, are chosen, while in Great Britain they 
accept eighty and in some years ninety per cent, of the ap- 
plicants. The small size of our army in comparison, how- 
ever, makes this showing less favorable than it at first 
appears. 

In camp, while the captain was away, the privates sug- 
gested a lot of college boys more than any other body of 
individuals. A few had the college boy's delight in shirk- 
ing their work, and would rejoice over having had a dirty 
carbine pass inspection on account of a shining barrel, as 
the Sophomore boasts of having gained a high marking for 
a translation he had read from a crib. They had also the 
college boy's songs, and his trick of giving nicknames, and 
his original and sometimes clever slang, and his satisfaction 
in expressing violent liking or dislike for those in authority 
over him — in the one case tutors and professors, and in the 
other sergeants and captains. Their one stupid hitch, in 
which the officers shared to some extent, was in re-enforcing 
all they said with profanity ; but as soldiers have done this, 
apparently, since the time of Shakespeare's Seven Ages, it 
must be considered an inherited characteristic. Their fun 
around the camp fire at night was rough, but it was some- 

85 



The West from a Car - Window 

times clever, though it was open to the objection that a 
clever story never failed of three or four repetitions. The 
greatest successes were those in which the officers, always 
of some other troop, were the butts. One impudent " crui- 
tie " made himself famous in a night by improvising an in- 
terview between himself and a troop commander who had 
met him that day as he was steering a mule train across 
the prairie. 

" * How are you V said be to me. ' You're one of Cap- 
tain Hardie's men, ain't you ? I'm Captain .' 

" * Glad to know you, captain,' said I. ' I've read about 
you in the papers.' " 

This was considered a magnificent stroke by the men, 
who thought the captain in question rather too fond of 
sending in reports concerning himself to headquarters. 

*' ' Well,' says he, ' when do you think we're going to 

catch this Garza? As for me,' says 

he, ' I'm that tired of the whole 

business that I'm willing to give up my job to 

any fool that will take it ' 



" * Well, old man,' says I, ' I'd be glad to relieve you,' 

says I, 'but I'd a sight rather serve under Captain 

Hardie than captain such a lot of regular 

coffee-coolers as you've got under you.' " 

The audacity of this entirely fictitious conversation was 
what recommended it to the men. I only reproduce it here 
as showing their idea of humor. An even greater success 
was that of a stolid German, who related a true incident of 
life at Fort Clarke, where the men were singing one night 
around the fire, when the colonel passed by, and ordered 
them into the tents, and to stop that noise. 

"And den," continued the soldier, "he come acrost Cab- 




CAPTAIN FRANCIS H. HARDIK, G TROOP, THIRD UNITED STATKS CAVALRY 



Our Troops on the Border 

ding , sitting in frond of his tent, and lie says to him 

quick like that, ' You ged into your tent, /oo.' That's what 
he said to him, ' You ged into your tent, too.'' " 

It is impossible to imagine the exquisite delight that this 
simple narrative gave. The idea of a real troop command- 
er having been told to get into his tent just like a common 
soldier brought the tears to the men's eyes, and the success 
of his story so turned the German's head that he continued 
repeating to himself and to any one he met for several days: 
" That's what he said, 'You ged into your tent, too.' That's 
what he said." 

Captain Hardie rode his detachment into camp on the 
third day, with horses so tired that they tried to lie down 
whenever there was a halt ; and a horse must be very tired 
before he will do that. Captain Hardie's riding-breeches 
were held together by the yellow stripes at their sides, and 
his hands were raw and swollen with the marks of the cac- 
tus needles, and his face burned and seared to a dull red. 
I had heard of him through the papers and from the officers 
at headquarters as the " Riding Captain," and as the one 
who had during the Garza campaign been most frequently 
in the saddle, and least given to sending in detailed reports 
of his own actions. He had been absolutely alone for the 
two months he had been in the field. He was the father of 
his men, as all troop commanders must be ; he had to doc- 
tor them when they were ill, to lend them money ^hen the 
paymaster lost his way in the brush, to write their letters, 
and to listen to their grievances, and explain that it was not 
because they were not good soldiers that they could not go 
out and risk being shot on this or that particular scouting 
party — he could do all this for them, but he could not talk 
to them. He had to sit in front of his own camp fire and 

39 



The West from a Car - Window 

hear tliem laughing around theirs, and consider the loneli- 
ness of south-western Texas, which is the loneliness of the 
ocean at night. He could talk to his Mexican guides, be- 
cause they, while they were under him, were not of his 
troop, and I believe it was this need to speak to some liv- 
ing soul that taught Captain Hardie to know Spanish as 
well as he did, and much more quickly than the best of tu- 
tors could have done in a year at the post. 

The Eastern mind does not occupy itself much with these 
guardians of its borders ; its idea of the soldier is the com- 
fortable, clubable fellow they meet in Washington and New 
York, whose red, white, and blue button is all that marks 
him from the other clubable, likable men about him. But 
they ought to know more and feel more for these equally 
likable men of the border posts, whose only knowledge of 
club life is the annual bill for dues, one of which, with su- 
preme irony, arrived in Captain Hardie's mail at a time 
when we had only bacon three times a day, and nothing 
but alkali water to silence the thirst that followed. To a 
young man it is rather pathetic to see another young man, 
with a taste and fondness for the pleasant things of this 
world, pull out his watch and hold it to the camp fire and 
say, " Just seven o'clock ; people in God's country are sit- 
ting down to dinner." And then a little later: "And now 
it's eight o'clock, and they are going to the theatres. What 
is there at the theatres now ?" And when I recalled the 
plays running in New York when I left it, the oflBcers would 
select which one they would go to, with much grave delib- 
eration, and then crawl in between two blankets and find 
the most comfortable angle at which a McClellan saddle 
will make a pillow. 

The Garza campaign is only of interest here as it shows 

40 



Our TroopH on the Border 

the work of the United States troops who were engaged in 
it. As for Caterino E. Garza himself, he may, by the time 
this appears in print, have been made President of Mexico, 
which is most improbable ; or have been captured in the 
brush, which is more improbable ; or he may have disap- 
peared from public notice altogether. It is only of interest 
to the Eastern man to know that a Mexican ranch-owner 
and sometime desperado and politician living in south-west 
Texas proclaimed a revolution against the Government of 
Mexico, and that that Government requested ours to see 
that the neutrality laws existing between the two countries 
were not broken by the raising of troops on our side of the 
Rio Grande River, and that followers of this Garcia should 
not be allowed to cross through Texas on their way to Mex- 
ico. This our Government, as represented by the Depart- 
ment of Texas, which has its headquarters at San Antonio, 
showed its willingness to do by sending at first two troops 
of cavalry, and later six more, into darkest Texas, with or- 
ders to take prisoners any bands of revolutionists they 
might find there; and to arrest all individual revolutionists 
with a warrant sworn to by two witnesses. The country 
into which these eight troops were sent stretches for three 
hundred and sixty miles along the Rio Grande River, where 
it separates Mexico from Texas, and runs back a hundred 
and more miles east, making of this so-called Garza territory 
an area of five hundred square miles. 

This particular country is the back-yard of the world. It 
is to the rest of the West what the ash-covered lots near 
High Bridge are to New York. It is the country which 
led General Sheridan to say that if he owned both places, 
he would rent Texas and live in hell. It is the strip of 
country over which we actually went to war with Mexico, 



The West from a Car - Window 

and whicli gave General Sherman the opportunity of mak- 
ing the epigramme, which no one who has not seen the 
utter desolateness of the land can justly value, that we 
should go to war with Mexico again, and force her to take 
it back. 

It is a country where there are no roses, but where every- 
thing that grows has a thorn. Where the cattle die of star- 
vation, and where the troops had to hold up the solitary 
train that passes over it once a day, in true road-agent fash- 
ion, to take the water from its boilers that their horses 
might not drop for lack of it. It is a country where the 
sun blinds and scorches at noon, and where the dew falls 
like a cold rain at night, and where one shivers in an over- 
coat at breakfast, and rides without coat or waistcoat and 
panting with the heat the same afternoon. Where there are 
no trees, nor running streams, nor rocks nor hills, but just 
an ocean of gray chaparral and white, chalky canons or red, 
dusty trails. If you leave this trail for fifty yards, you 
may wander for twenty miles before you come to water or 
a ranch or another trail, and by that time the chaparral and 
cactus will have robbed you of your clothing, and left in 
its place a covering of needles, which break when one at- 
tempts to draw them out, and remain in the flesh to fester 
and swell the skin, and leave it raw and tender for a week. 
This country, it is almost a pleasure to say, is America's 
only in its possession. No white men, or so few that they 
are not as common as century -plants, live in it. It is Mex- 
ican in its people, its language, and its mode of life. The 
few who inhabit its wilderness are ranch-owners, and their 
shepherds and cowboys ; and a ranch, which means a store 
and six or seven thatched adobe houses around it, is at the 
nearest three miles from the next ranch, and on an average 



Oar Troops on the Border 

twenty miles. As a rule, they move farther away the long- 
er you ride towards them. 

Into this foreign country of five hundred square miles 
the eight United States cavalry troops of forty men each 
and two companies of infantry were sent to find Garza and 
his followers. The only means by which a man or horses 
or cows can be tracked in this desert is by the foot or hoof 
prints which they may leave in the sandy soil as they fol- 
low the trails already made or make fresh ones. To follow 
these trails it is necessary to have as a guide a man born in 
the brush, who has trailed cattle for a livelihood. The 
Mexican Government supplied the troops with some of 
their own people, who did not know the particular country 
into which they were sent, but who could follow a trail in 
any country. One or two of these, sometimes none, went 
with each troop. What our Government should have done 
was to supply each troop commander with five or six 
of these men, who could have gone out in search of 
trails, and reported at the camp whenever they had 
found a fresh one. By this means the troops could have 
been saved hundreds of miles of unnecessary marching 
and countermarching on " false alarms," and the Gov- 
ernment much money, as the campaign in that event 
would have been brought much more rapidly to a con- 
clusion. 

But the troop commanders in the field had no such aids. 
They had to ride forth whenever so ordered to do by the 
authorities at headquarters, some two hundred miles from 
the scene of the action, who had in turn received their in- 
formation from the Mexican general on the other side of 
the Rio Grande. This is what made doing their duty, as 
represented by obeying orders, such a diflScult thing to 



.The West from a Car -Window 

the troops in the Garza territory. They knew before they 
saddled their horses that they were going out on a wild- 
goose chase to wear out their horses and their own pati- 
ence, and to accomplish nothing beyond furnishing Garza's 
followers with certain satisfaction in seeing a large body 
of men riding solemnly through a dense underbrush in a 
blinding sun to find a trail which a Mexican general had 
told an American general would be sure to lead them to 
Garza, and news of which had reached them a week after 
whoever had made the trail had passed over it. They 
could imagine, as they trotted in a long, dusty line through 
the chaparral, as conspicuous marks on the plain as a prai- 
rie-wagon, that Garza or his men were watching them from 
under a clump of cactus on some elevation in the desert, 
and that he would say : 

" Ah ! the troops are out again, I see. Who is it to-day 
— Hardie, Chase, or Hunter? Lend me your field-glass. 
Ah! it is Hardie. He is a good rider. I hope he will not 
get a sunstroke." 

And then they would picture how the revolutionists would 
continue the smoking of their cornstalk cigarettes and the 
drinking of the smuggled muscal. 

This is not an exaggerated picture. A man could lie 
hidden in this brush and watch the country on every side 
of him, and see each of the few living objects which might 
pass over it in a day, as easily as he could note the approach 
of a three-masted schooner at sea. And even though troops 
came directly towards him, he had but to lie flat in the 
brush within twenty feet of them, and they would not know 
it. It would be as easy to catch Jack the Ripper with a 
Lord-Mayor's procession as Garza with a detachment of cav- 
alry, unless they stumbled upon him by luck, or unless he 

40 



Our Troops on the Border 

had with hira so many men that their trail could be followed 
at a gallop. As a matter of fact and history, the Garza 
movement was broken up in the first three weeks of its in- 
ception by the cavalry and the Texas Rangers and the dep- 
uty sheriffs, who rode after the large bodies of men and 
scattered them. After that it was merely a chase after little 
bands of from three to a dozen men, who travelled by night 
and slept by day in their race towards the river, or, when 
met there by the Mexican soldiers, in their race back again. 
The fact that every inhabitant of the ranches and every 
Mexican the troops met was a secret sympathizer with Gar- 
za was another and most important difficulty in the way of 
his pursuers. And it was trying to know that the barking 
of the dogs of a ranch was not yet out of ear-shot before a 
vaquero was scuttling off through the chaparral to tell the 
hiding revolutionists that the troops were on their way, 
and which way they were coming. 

And so, while it is no credit to soldiers to do their duty, 
it is creditable to them when they do their duty knowing 
that it is futile, and that some one has blundered. If a fire 
company in New York City were ordered out on a false 
alarm every day for three months, knowing that it was not 
a fire to which they were going, but that some one had 
wanted a messenger-boy, and rung up an engine by mis- 
take, the alertness and fidelity of those firemen would be 
most severely tested. That is why I admired, and why the 
readers in the East should admire, the discipline and the 
faithfulness with which the cavalry on the border of Texas did 
their duty the last time Trumpeter Tyler sounded "Boots 
and Saddles," and went forth as carefully equipped, and as 
eager and hopeful that this time meant fighting, as they did 
the first. 

47 



The West from a Car - Window 

Their life in the field was as near to nature, and, as far as 
comforts were concerned, to the beasts of the field, as men 
often come. A tramp in the Eastern States lives like a re- 
spectable householder in comparison. Suppose, to better 
understand it, that you were ordered to leave your house or 
flat or hall bedroom and live in the open air for two months, 
and that you were limited in your selection of what you 
wished to carry with you to the weight of eighty pounds. 
You would find it difficult to adjust this eighty pounds in 
such a way that it would include any comforts ; certainly, 
there would be no luxuries. The soldiers of Troop G, be- 
sides the things before enumerated, were given for a day's 
rations a piece of bacon as large as your hand, as much cof- 
fee as would fill three large cups, and enough flour to make 
five or six heavy biscuits, which they justly called "Mobes," 
after the clay bricks of which Mexican adobe houses are 
made. In camp they received potatoes and beans. All of 
these things were of excellent quality and were quite satisfy- 
ing, as the work supplies an appetite to meet them. This is 
not furnished by the Government, and costs it nothing, but 
it is about the best article in the line of sustenance that the 
soldier receives. He sleeps on a blanket with his " bunkie," 
and with his " bunkie's" blanket over him. If he is cold, he 
can build the fire higher, and doze in front of that. He 
rides, as a rule, from seven in the morning to five in the 
afternoon, without a halt for a noonday meal, and he gen- 
erally gets to sleep by eight or nine. The rest of the time 
he is in the saddle. Each man carries a frying-pan about 
as large as a plate, with an iron handle, which folds over 
and is locked in between the pan and another iron plate 
that closes upon it. He does his own cooking in this, un- 
less he happens to be the captain's " striker," when he has 




jr^~:ty ' 5-< 



1^''%,^,^%^. 







THE MEXICAN GUIDE 



Our Troops on the Border 

double duty. He is so equipped and so tauglit that lie is 
an entirely independent organization in himself, and he and 
his horse eat and sleep and work as a unit, and are as much 
and as little to the rest of the troop as one musket and bay- 
onet are to the line of them when a company salutes. 

We had for a guide one of the most picturesque ruffians 
I ever met. He was a Mexican murderer to the third or 
fourth degree, as Captain Hardie explained when I first 
met him, and had been liberated from a jail in Mexico in 
order that he might serve his country on this side of the 
river as a guide, and that his wonderful powers as a trailer 
might not be wasted. 

He rejoiced in his liberty from iron bars and a bare mud 
floor, and showed his gratitude in the most untiring vigil- 
ance and in the endurance of what seemed to the Eastern 
mind the greatest discomforts. He always rode in advance 
of the column, and with his eyes wandering from the trail 
to the horizon and towards the backs of distant moving 
cattle, and again to the trail at his feet. AVhenever he saw 
any one — and he could discover a suspected revolutionist 
lono- before anv one else — the first intimation the rest of 
the scouting party would get of it w^as his pulling out his 
Winchester and disappearing on a gallop into the chaparral. 
He scorned the assistance of the troop, and when we came 
up to him again, after a wild dash through the brush, which 
left our hats and portions of our clothing to mark our way, 
we would find him with his prisoner's carbine tucked under 
his arm, and beaming upon him with a smile of wicked sat- 
isfaction. 

As a trailer he showed, as do many of these guides, what 
seemed to be a gift of second-sight cultivated to a super- 
natural degree. He would say : " Five horses have passed 

51 



The West from a Car - Window 

ahead of us about an hour since. Two are led and one has 
two men on his back, and there is one on each of the other 
two ;" which, when we caught up to them at the first wa- 
tering-place, would prove to be true. Or he would tell us 
that troops or Rangers to such a number had crossed the 
trail at some time three or four days before, that a certain 
mark was made by a horse wandering without a rider, or 
that another had been made by a pony so many years old— 
all of which statements would be verified later But it was 
as a would-be belligerent that he shone most picturesquely. 
When he saw a thin column of smoke rising from a canon 
where revolutionists were supposed to be in camp, or came 
upon several armed men riding towards us and too close to 
escape, his face would light up with a smile of the most 
wicked content and delight, and he would beam like a can- 
nibal before a feast as he pumped out the empty cartridges 
and murmured, " Buena ! buena ! buena I" with rolling eyes 
and an anticipatory smack of the lips. 

But he was generally disappointed ; the smoke would 
come from a shepherd's fire, and the revolutionists would 
point to the antelope-skins under their saddles, which had 
been several months in drying, and swear they were hunt- 
ers, and call upon the saints to prove that they had never 
heard of such a man as Garza, and that carbines, revolvers, 
and knives were what every antelope-hunter needed for self- 
protection. At which the Mexican would show his teeth 
and roll his eyes with such a cruel show of disbelief that 
they would beg the " good captain " to protect them and 
let them go, which, owing to the fact that one cannot get a 
warrant and a notary public in the brush, as the regulations 
require, he would, after searching them, be compelled 
to do. 



Our 7)-oo2)s on the Border 

And then the Mexican, who had expected to see them 
hung to a tree until they talked or died, as would have been 
done in his own free republic, would sigh bitterly, and trot 




'■^^^^', 



THIRD CAVALRY TROOPERS — SEARCHING A SUSPECTED RETOLCFTIONIST 



off patiently and hopefully after more. Hope was especial- 
ly invented for soldiers and fishermen. One thought of this 
when one saw the spirit of the men as they stole out at night, 
holding up their horses' heads to make them step lightly, and 
dodgina; the lights of the occasional ranches, and startling 
some shepherd sleeping by the trail into the belief that a file 

53 



The West from a Car - Window 

of ghosts had passed by him in the mist. They were always 
sure that this time it meant something, and if the captain 
made a dash from the trail, and pounded with his fist on 
the door of a ranch where lights shone when lights should 
have been put out, the file of ghosts that had stretched back 
two hundred yards into the night in an instant became a 
close-encircling line of eager, open-eyed boys, with carbines 
free from the sling - belts, covering the windows and the 
grudgingly opened door. They never grew weary ; they 
rode on many days from nine at night to five the next af- 
ternoon, with but three hours' sleep. On one scouting ex- 
pedition Tyler and myself rode one hundred and ten miles 
in thirty-three hours ; the average, however, was from thir- 
ty to fifty miles a day ; but the hot, tired eyes of the en- 
listed men kept wandering over the burning prairie as 
though looking for gold ; and if on the ocean of cactus 
they saw a white object move, or a sombrero drop from 
sight, or a horse with a saddle on its back, they would 
pass the word forward on the instant, and wait breathless- 
ly until the captain saw it too. 

I asked some of them what they thought of when they 
were riding up to these wandering bands of revolutionists, 
and they told me that from the moment the captain had 
shouted " Howmp !" which is the only order he gives for 
any and every movement, they had made themselves cor- 
porals, had been awarded the medal of honor, and had 
spent the thirty thousand dollar reward for Garza's capture. 
And so if any one is to take Garza, and the hunting of the 
Snark is to be long continued in Texas, I hope it will be 
G Troop, Third Cavalry, that brings the troublesome little 
wretch into camp ; not because they have worked so much 
harder than the others, but because they had no tents, as 



Our Troops on the Border 

did the others, and no tinned goods, and no pay for two 
months, and because they had such an abundance of enthu- 
siasm and hope, and the good cheer that does not come 
from the commissariat department or the canteen. 



Ill 

AT A NEW MINING CAMP 



At a New Mining Cam}) 




III 

AT A NEW MINING CAMP 

Y only ideas of a new mining camp before I 
visited Creede were derived from an early and 
eager study of Bret Harte. Not that I ex- 
pected to see one of his mining camps or his 
own people when I visited Creede, but the few ideas of 
miners and their ways and manners that I had were 
those which he had given me. I should have liked, al- 
though I did not expect it, to see the outcasts of Poker 
Flat before John Oakhurst, in his well-fitting frock-coat, 
had left the outfit, and Yuba Bill pulling up his horses in 
front of the Lone Star saloon, where Colonel Starbuckle, 
with one elbow resting on the bar, and with his high white 
hat tipped to one side, waited to do him honor. I do not 
know that Bret Harte ever said that Colonel Starbuckle 
had a white hat, but I always pictured him in it, and with 
a black stock. I wanted to hear people say, " Waal, stran- 
ger," and to see auburn-haired giants in red shirts, with 
bags of gold-dust and nuggets of silver, and much should I 
have liked to meet Rose of Touloumme. But all that I 
found at Creede which reminded me of these miners and 
gamblers and the chivalric extravagant days of '49 were a 
steel pan, like a frying-pan without a handle, which I rec- 
ognized with a thrill as the pan for washing gold, and a 



The West from a Car - Window 



pick in the corner of a cabin ; and once when a man hailed 
me as "Pardner" on the mountain-side, and asked " What 
luck?" The men and the scenes in this new silver camp 
showed what might have existed in the more glorious sun- 
shine of California, but they were dim and commonplace, 
and lacked the sharp, clear-cut personality of Bret Harte's 
men and scenes. They were like the negative of a photo- 




MINING CAMP ON THE KANGE ABOVE CKEEDE 

graph which has been under-exposed, and which no amount 
of touching up will make clear. So I will not attempt to 
touch them up. 

When I first read of Creede, when I was so ignorant con- 
cerning it that I pronounced the final e, it was on the date 
line of a newspaper, and made no more impression upon 
me then than though it were printed simply Creede. But 
after I had reached Denver, and even before, when I had 
begun to find ray way about the Western newspapers, it 
seemed to be spelled Creede. In Denver it faced you 

60 



At a New Mining Camp 

everywhere from bill-boards, flaunted at you from canvas 
awnings stretched across the streets, and stared at you from 
daily papers in type an inch long; the shop-windows, ac- 
cording to their several uses, advertised " Photographs of 
Creede," " The only correct map of Creede," " Specimen 
ore from the Holy Moses Mine, Creede," " Only direct route 
to Creede," " Scalp tickets to Creede," " Wanted, $500 to 
start drug-store in Creede," " You will need boots at Creede, 

and you can get them at 's." The gentlemen in the 

Denver Club talk Creede ; the people in the hotels dropped 
the word so frequently that you wondered if they were not 
all just going there, or were not about to write Creede on 
the register. It was a common language, starting-point, 
and interest. It was as momentous as the word Johnstown 
during the week after the flood. 

The train which carried me there held stern, important- 
looking old gentlemen, who, the porter told me in an awed 
whisper, were one-third or one-fifteenth owners of the Pot- 
lack Mine ; young men in Astrakhan fur coats and new 
top boots laced at the ankles, trying to look desperate and 
rough ; grub-stake prospectors, with bedding, pick, and ra- 
tions in a roll on the seat beside them ; more young men, 
who naively assured me when they found that I, too, was 
going to Creede, and not in top-boots and revolvers and a 
flannel shirt, that they had never worn such things before, 
and really had decent clothes at home ; also women who 
smoked with the men and passed their flasks down the 
length of the car, and two friendless little girls, of whom 
every one except the women, who seemed to recognize a 
certain fitness of things, took unremitting care. Every one 
on the crowded train showed the effect of the magnet that 
was drawing him — he was restless, impatient, and excited. 



The West from a Car - Window 

Half of them did not know what they were going to find ; 
and the other half, who had already taken such another 
journey to Leadville, Aspen, or Cripple Creek, knew only 
too well, and yet hoped that this time — 

Creede lies in a gully between two great mountains. In 
the summer the mountain streams wash down into this gully 
and turn it into a little river ; but with the recklessness of 
true gamblers, the people who came to Creede built their 
stores, houses, and saloons as near the base of the great 
sides of the valley as they could, and if the stream comes 
next summer, as it has done for hundreds of years before, 
it will carry with it fresh pine houses and log huts instead 
of twigs and branches. 

The train stopped at the opening of this gully, and its 
passengers jumped out into two feet of mud and snow. 
The ticket and telegraph office on one side of the track 
vyere situated in a freight car with windows and doors 
cut out of it, and with the familiar blue and white sign of 
the Western Union nailed to one end ; that station was 
typical of the whole town in its rawness, and in the tem- 
porary and impromptu air of its inhabitants. If you looked 
back at the road over which you had just come, you saw 
the beautiful circle of the Wagon Wheel Gap, a chain of 
magnificent mountains white with snow, picked with hun- 
dreds of thousands of pine-trees so high above one that 
they looked like little black pins. The clouds, less white 
than the snow, lay packed in between the peaks of the 
range, or drifted from one to another to find a resting- 
place, and the sun, beating down on both a blinding glare, 
showed other mountains and other snow-capped ranges for 
fifty miles beyond. This is at the opening of Willow 
Gulch into which Creede has hurried and the sides of which 

62 



At a New Mining Camp 

it has tramped into mud and covered with hundreds of lit- 
tle pine boxes of houses and log -cabins, and the simple 
quadrangles of four planks which mark a building site. In 
front of you is a village of fresh pine. There is not a 
brick, a painted front, nor an awning in the whole town. It 
is like a city of fresh card-board, and the pine shanties 
seem to trust for support to the rocky sides of the gulch 
into which they have squeezed themselves. In the street 
are ox -teams, mules, men, and donkeys loaded with ore, 
crowding each other familiarly, and sinking knee-deep in 
the mud. Furniture and kegs of beer, bedding and canned 
provisions, clothing and half-open packing-cases, and piles 
of raw lumber are heaped up in front of the new stores — 
or those still to be built — stores of canvas only, stores with 
canvas tops and foundations of logs, and bowses with the 
Leadville front, where the upper boards have been left 
square instead of following the sloping angle of the roof. 

It is more like a circus-tent, which has sprung up over- 
night and which may be removed on the morrow, than a 
town, and you cannot but feel that the people about you 
are a part of the show. A great shaft of rock that rises 
hundreds of feet above the lower town gives the little village 
at its base an absurdly pushing, impudent air, and the si- 
lence of the mountains around from ten to fourteen thousand 
feet high, makes the confusion of hammers and the cries of 
the drivers swearing at their mules in the mud and even 
the random blasts from the mines futile and ridiculous. It 
is more strange and fantastic at night, when it appears to 
one looking down from half-way up the mountain like a 
camp of gypsies at the foot of a canon. On the raw pine 
fronts shine electric lights in red and blue globes, mixing 
with the hot, smoky glare rising from the saloons and gam- 



The Wfsf from a Car - Windo20 

bling-liouses, and striking upward far enough to show the 
signs of The Holy Moses Saloon, The Theatre Comiqne, 
The Keno, and The Little Delraonico against the face of 
the great rock at their back doors, but only suggesting the 
greater mass of it which towers majestically above, hidden 
somewhere in the night. It is as incongruous as an excur- 
sion boat covered with colored lights, and banging out 
popular airs at the base of the Palisades. 

The town of Creede is in what is known as the King 




HOW LAND IS CLAIMED FOR BUILDING — PLANKS NAILED TOGETHER AND 
RESTING ON FOUR STOMPS 



At a Neio Mining Camp 

Solomon district ; it is three liundred and twenty miles 
from Denver, and lies directly in the pathway of the Great 
Divide. Why it was not discovered sooner, why, indeed, 
there is one square foot of land in Colorado containing 
silver not yet discovered, is something which the Eastern 
mind cannot grasp. Colorado is a State, not a country, 
and in that State the mines of Leadville, Aspen, Ouray, 
Clear Creek County, Telluride, Boulder, Silverton, and 
Cripple Creek, have yielded up in the last year forty mill- 
ion dollars. If the State has done that much, it can do 
more ; and I could not understand why any one in Colorado 
should remain contentedly at home selling ribbons when 
there must be other mines to be had for the finding. A 
prospector is, after all, very much like a tramp, but with a 
knowledge of minerals, a pick, rations, a purpose, and — 
hope. We know how many tramps we have in the East ; 
imagine, then, all of these, instead of wandering lazily and 
purposelessly from farm-house to farm-house, stopping in- 
stead to hammer at a bit of rock, or stooping to pick up 
every loose piece they find. One would think that with a 
regular army like this searching everywhere in Colorado 
no one acre of it would by this time have remained un- 
claimed. But this new town of Creede, once known only 
as Willow Gap, was discovered but twenty months ago, 
and it was not until December last that the railway reached 
it, and, as I have said, there is not a station there yet. 

N. C. Creede was a prospector who had made some 
money in the Monarch district before he came to Willow 
Gap ; he began prospecting there on Campbell, now Moses 
Mount, with G. L. Smith, of Salida. One of the two picked 
up a piece of rock so full of quartz that they sunk a shaft 
immediately below the spot where they had found the 
• 67 



The West from a Car - Window 

stone. According to all known laws, they should have 
sunk the shaft at the spot from which the piece of rock 
had become detached, or from whence it had presumably 
rolled. It was as absurd to dig for silver where they did 
dig as it would be to sink a shaft in Larimer Street, in Den- 
ver, because one had found a silver quarter lying in the 
roadway. But they dug the shaft ; and when they looked 
upon the result of the first day's work, Smith cried, " Great 
God !" and Creede said, " Holy Moses !" and the Holy 
Moses Mine was named. While I was in Creede that gen- 
tleman was offered one million two hundred and fifty thou- 
sand dollars for his share of this mine, and declined it. 
After that my interest in him fell away. Any man who 
will live in a log house at the foot of a mountain, and drink 
melted snow any longer than he has to do so, or refuse that 
much money for anything, when he could live in the Knick- 
erbocker Flats, and drive forth in a private hansom with 
rubber tires, is no longer an object of public interest. 

But his past history is the history of the town. Creede 
and his partner knew they had a mine, but had no money 
to work it. So they applied to David S. Moffatt, the presi- 
dent of the Rio Grande Railroad, which has a track to 
Wagon Wheel Gap only ten miles away, and Moffatt and 
others formed the Holy Moses Mining Company, and se- 
cured a bond on the property at seventy thousand dollars. 
As soon as this was known, the invasion of Willow Gap be- 
gan. It was the story of Columbus and the Qgg. Pros- 
pectors, and provisions with which to feed them, came in 
on foot and on stages, and Creede began to grow. But 
no more mines were found at once, and the railroad into 
the town was slow in coming, and many departed, leaving 
their posts and piles of rock to mark their claims. But 




THE " UULY MOSEYS MIME 



At a New Mining Camp 

last June Creecle received a second boom, and in a manner 
which heaps ridicule and scorn upon the scientific knowl- 
edge of engineers and mining experts, and which shows 
that luck, chance, and the absurd vagaries of fate are fac- 
tors of success upon which a prospector should depend. 

Ralph Granger and Eri Buddenbock ran a butcher shop 
at AVagon Wheel Gap. "The" Renninger, of Patiro, a 
prospector with no tools or provisions, asked them to grub- 
stake him, as it is called when a man of capital furnishes a 
man of adventure with bacon, flour, a pick, and three or 
four donkeys, and starts him off prospecting, with the un- 
derstanding that he is to have one-tenth of what he finds. 
Renninger asked Jule Haas to join him, and they de- 
parted together. One day the three burros disappeared, 
and wandered off many miles, with Renninger in hot and 
profane pursuit until they reached Bachelor Mountain, 
where he overtook them. But they liked Bachelor Mount- 
ain, and Renninger, failing to dislodge them with either 
rocks or kicks, seated himself to await their pleasure, and 
began to chip casually at the nearest rock. lie struck a 
vein showing mineral in such rich quantities that he asked 
Creede to come up and look at it. Creede looked at it, and 
begged Renninger to define his claim at once. Renninger, 
offering up thanks to the three donkeys, did so, and named 
it the " Last Chance." Then Creede located next to this 
property, shoulder to shoulder, and named his claim the 
" Amethyst." These names are merely names to you ; 
they mean nothing; in Colorado you speak them in a whis- 
per, and they sound like the Standard Oil Company or the 
Koh-i-noor diamond. Haas was bought off for ten thou- 
sand dollars. He went to Germany to patronize the peo- 
ple in the little German village from which he came with 



The West from a Car - Window 

his great wealth ; four months later Renninger, and Bud- 
denbock, who had staked him, sold their thirds for seventy 
thousand dollars each ; a few days later Granger was of- 
fered one hundred thousand dollars for his third, and said 
he thought he would hold on to it. When I was there, the 
Chance was putting out one hundred and eighty thousand 
dollars per month. This shows that Granger was wiser in 
his generation than Haas. 

At the time I visited Creede it was quite impossible to 
secure a bed in any of the hotels of lodging-houses. The 
Pullman cars were the only available sleeping-places, and 
rented out their berths for the night they laid over at the 
mining camp. But even in these, sleeping was precarious, 
as one gentleman found the night after my arrival. lie 
was mistaken for another man who had picked up a bag of 
gold-dust from a faro table at Little Delmonico's, and who 
had fled into the night. After shooting away the pine- 
board facade in the Mint gambling-house in which he was 
supposed to have sought shelter, several citizens followed 
him on to the sleeping-car, and, of course, pulled the wrong 
man out of his berth, and stood him up in the aisle in front 
of four revolvers, while the porter and the other wrong 
mcM shivered under their blankets, and begged them from 
behind the closed curtains to take him outside before they 
began shooting. The camp was divided in its opinion on 
the following morning as to whether the joke was on the 
passenger or on the hasty citizens. 

A colony of younger sons from the East took pity upon 
me, and gave me a bunk in their Grub Stake cabin, where 
I had the satisfaction of watching the son of a president of 
the Somerset Club light the fire with kerosene while the 
rest of us remained under the blankets and asked him to 

T2 



At a Netv Minimj Camp 




DEBATABLE GROUND — A WARNING TO TRESPASSERS 



be careful. They were a most hospitable, cheerful lot. 
When it was so cold that the ice was frozen in the tin 
basin, they would elect to remain in bed all day, and would 
mark up the prices they intended to ask for their lots and 
claims one hundred dollars each ; and then, considering 
this a fair day's wages for a hard day's work, would go 
warmly to sleep again. It is interesting, chiefly to mothers 
and sisters — for the fathers and brothers have an unsympa- 
thetic way of saying, "It is the best thing for him" — to 
discover how quickly such carefully bred youths as one con- 
stantly meets in the mining camps and ranches of the West 
can give up the comforts and habits of years and fit into 
their surroundings. It is instructive and hopeful to watch 

73 



The West from a Car - Window 

a young man who can and has ordered numerous dinners 
at Bignon's, composing a dessert of bread and molasses, 
or to see liow neatly a Yale graduate of one year's standing 
can sweep the mud from the cabin floor without spreading 
it. If people at home could watch these young exiles 
gorge themselves with their letters, a page at a time, and 
then go over them again word by word, they would write 
early and often ; and if the numerous young women of 
New York and Boston could know that their photographs 
were the only bright spots in a log-cabin filled with cart- 
ridge-belts, picks, saddles, foot-ball sweaters, patent-medi- 
cine bottles, and three-months-old magazines, they would 
be moved with great content. 

One cannot always discern the true character of one's 
neighbors in the West. " Dress," as Bob Acres says, 
" does make a difference." There were four very rough- 
looking men of different ages sitting at a table near me in 
one of the restaurants or " eating-houses " of Creede. They 
had marked out a map on the soiled table-cloth with the 
point of an iron fork, and one of them was laying down 
the law concerning it. There seemed to be a dispute con- 
cerning the lines of the claim or the direction in which the 
vein ran. It was no business of mine, and there was so 
much of that talk that I should not have been attracted to 
them, except that I expected from their manner they might 
at any moment come to blows or begin shooting. I fin- 
ished before they did, and as I passed the table over which 
they leaned scowling excitedly, the older man cried, with 
his finger on the map : 

"Then Thompson passed the ball back to me— no, not 
your Thompson ; Thompson of '79 I mean — and I carried 
it down the field all the way to the twenty-five-yard line, 

74 



At a JVew Mining Cam]) 

Canfield, who was playing full, tackled me ; but I shook 
him off, and — " 

I should have liked to wait a»d hear whether or not he 
made his touch-down. 

The shaft of the Last Chance Mine is at the top of the 
Bachelor Mountain, an4 one has to ellmd) and slip for an 
hour and a half to. reach it. A very nice Yale boy guided 
me there, and seemed as willing as myself to sit dowu in 
the snow every ten minutes and look at the S€e»ery, But 
we saw much more of the scenery than of the mine, be- 
cause there was more of it to see, and there was no general 
manager to prevent u« from looking as long as we liked. The 
trail led over fallen logs and up slippery rocks caked with 
ice and through drifts of snow higher than one's head, and 
the pines accompanied us all the way with branjches bent 
to the mountain-side with the weight of the snow, and a 
cold, cheery mountain stream appeared and disappeared 
from under long bridges of ice and mocked at us for our 
slow progress. But we gave it a very close race coming 
down. Sometimes we walked in the cold, dark shadows 
of the pines, where hardly a ray of sunlight came, and 
again the trail would cross a landslide, and the wind 
brought strong odors of the pine and keen, icy blasts from 
the snow-capped ranges which stretched before us for fifty 
miles, and we could see Creede lying at our feet like a box 
of spilled jackstraws. Every now and then we met long 
lines of burros carrying five bags of one each, with but 
twenty dollars' worth of silver scattered through each load, 
and we could hear the voice of the driver from far up 
above and the tinkle of the bell as they descended upon 
us. Sometimes they made way for us or halted timidly 
with curious, patient eyes, and sometimes they shouldered 

7T 



The West from a Car - Window 

us promptly backward into three feet of snow. It was a 
lonely, impressive journey, and the wonderful beauty and 
silence of the mountain made words impertinent. And, 
again, we would come upon a solitary prospector tapping 
at the great rock in front of him, and only stopping to dip 
his hot face and blistered hands into the snow about him, 
before he began to drive the steel bar again with the help 
which hope gave him. His work but for this ingredient 
would seem futile, foolish, and impossible. Why, he would 
ask himself, should T work against this stone safe day after 
day only to bore a hole in its side as minute as a nail's 
point in the front of a house, and a thousand rods, prob- 
ably, from where tlie hole should be ? And then hope 
tells him that perhaps the very next stroke will make him 
a millionaire like Oreede, and so he makes the next stroke, 
and the next, and the next. 

If ever I own a silver mine, I am going to have it situ- 
ated at the base of a mountain, and not at the top. I would 
not care to take that journey we made to the Chance every 
day. I would rather sit in the office below and read re- 
ports. After one gets there, the best has been seen ; for 
the general manager of the Last Chance Mine, to whom I 
had a letter of introduction, and indeed all the employes, 
guarded their treasure with the most praiseworthy and 
faithful vigilance. It was evident that they were quietly 
determined among themselves to resist any attempt on the 
part of the Yale man and myself to carry away the shaft 
with us. We could have done so only over their dead 
bodies. The general manager confounded me with the 
editor of the Saturday Nighty which he said he reads, and 
which certainly ought to account for several things. I ex- 
pected to be led into a tunnel, and to be shown delicate 

78- 




J*>v*^- ^1 



.^:^^i> 





At a New Mining Camp 

veins of white silver running around the sides, which one 
could cut out with a penknife and make into scarf-pins 
and watch guards. If not, from whence, then, do the nug- 
gets come that the young and disappointed lover sends as 
a wedding present to the woman who should have married 
him, when she marries some other man who has sensibly 
remained in the East — a present, indeed, which has always 
struck me as extremely economical, and much cheaper than 
standing-lamps. But I saw no silver nuggets. One of the 
workmen showed us a hole in the side of the mountain 
which he assured us was the Last Chance Mine, and that 
out of this hole one hundred and eighty thousand dollars 
came every month. He then handed us a piece of red 
stone and a piece of black stone, and said that when these 
two stones were found together silver was not far off. To 
one thirsting for a sight of the precious metal this was 
about as satisfying as being told that after the invitations 
had been sent out and the awning stretched over the side- 
walk there was a chance of a dance in the neighborhood. 
I was also told that the veins lie between walls of porphyry 
and trachyte, but that there is not a distinctly marked dif- 
ference, as the walls resemble each other closely. This 
may or may not be true ; it is certainly not interesting, and 
I regret that I cannot satisfy the mining expert as to the 
formation of the mine, or tell him whether or not the 
vein is a heavy galena running so much per cent, of 
lead, or a dry silicious ore, or whether the ore bodies 
were north and south, and are or are not true fissures, 
and at what angle the contact or body veins cut these 
same fissures. Ail of this I should have ascertained had 
the general manager been more genial ; but we cannot ex- 
pect one man to combine the riches of Montezuma and 

p 81 



The West from a Car - Window 

the graces of Chesterfield. One is sure to destroy the 
other. 

The social life of Oreede is much more interesting than 
outputs and ore values. There were several social func- 
tions while I was there which tend to show the happy 
spirit of the place. There was a prize-fight at Billy 
Woods', a pie-eating match at Kernan's, a Mexican circus 
in the bottom near Wagon Wheel Gap, a religious service 
at Watrous and Bannigan's gambling-house, and the first 
wedding in the history of the town. I was sorry to miss 
this last, especially as three prominent citizens, misunder. 
standing the purpose of my visit to Creede, took the trouble 
to scour the mountain-side for me in order that I might 
photograph the wedding party in a group, which I should 
have been delighted to do. The bride was the sister of 
Billy Woods's barkeeper, and " Stony " Sargeant, a faro- 
dealer at " Soapy " Smith's, was the groom. The Justice 
of the Peace, whose name I forget, performed the cere- 
mony, and Edward De Vinne, the Tramp Poet, offered a 
few aj^propriate and well - chosen remarks, after which 
Woods and Smith, who run rival gambling-houses, outdid 
each other in the extravagant practice of " opening wine." 
All of these are prominent citizens, and the event was 
memorable. 

I met several of these prominent citizens while in 
Creede, and found them aifable. Billy AVoods fights, or 
used to fight, at two hundred and ten pounds, and rejoices 
in the fact that a New York paper once devoted five col- 
umns to his personality. Ilis reputation saves him the ex- 
pense of paying men to keep order. Bob Ford, who shot 
Jesse James, was another prominent citizen of my acquaint- 
ance. He does not look like a desperado, but has a loutish 




i 




VALUABLE HEAL ESTATE 



At a New Miniiuj Camp 

apologetic air, wliicli is explained by the fact that he shot 
Jesse James in the back, when the latter was engaged in 
the innocent work of hanging a picture on the wall. Ford 
never quite recovered from the fright he received when 
he found out who it was that he had killed. "Bat" Mas- 
terden was of an entirely different class. lie dealt for 
AYatrous, and has killed twenty-eight men, once three to- 
gether. One night when lie was off duty I saw a drunken 
man slap his face, and the silence was so great that we 
could hear the electric light sputter in the next room ; but 
Masterden only laughed, and told the man to come back 
and do it again when he was sober. " Troublesome Tom " 
Cady acted as a capper for "Soapy " Smith, and played the 
shell game during the day. He was very grateful to me 
for teaching him a much superior method in which the 
game is played in the effete East. His master, " Soapy " 
Smith, was a very bad man indeed, and hired at least 
twelve men to lead the prospector with a little money, or 
the tenderfoot who had just arrived, up to the numerous 
tables in his gambling-saloon, where they were robbed in 
various ways so openly that they deserved to lose all that 
was taken from them. 

There were also some very good shots at Creede, and 
some very bad ones. Of these latter was Mr. James Pow- 
ers, who emptied his revolver and Rab Brothers' store at 
the same time without doing any damage. He explained 
that he was crowded and wanted more room. The most 
delicate shooting was done by the Louisiana Kid — I don't 
know what his other name was — who was robbed in 
Soapy Smith's saloon, and was put out when he expost- 
ulated. He waited patiently until one of Smith's men 
named Farnham, appeared, and then, being more intent 

85 



The West from a Car -Window 

in showing- his skill than on killing Farnham, shot the 
thumb off his right hand as it rested on the trigger. Farn- 
ham shifted his pistol to his left hand, with which he shot 
equally well, but before he could fire the Kid shot the 
thumb off that hand too. 

This is, of course, Creede at night. It is not at all a dan- 
gerous place, and the lawlessness is scattered and mild. 
There was only one street, and as no one cared to sit on 
the edge of a bunk in a cold room at night, the gambling- 
houses were crowded in consequence every evening. It 
was simply because there was nowhere else to go. The 
majority of the citizens used them as clubs, and walked 
from one to the other talking claims and corner lots, and 
dived down into their pockets for specimens of ore which 
they passed around for examination. Others went there to 
keep warm, and still others to sleep in the corner until 
they were put out. The play was never high. There was 
so much of it, though, that it looked very bad and' wicked 
and. rough, but it was quite harmless. There were no sud- 
den oaths, nor parting of the crowd, and pistol - shots or 
gleaming knives — or, at least, but seldom. The women 
who frequented these places at night, in spite of their som- 
breros and flannel shirts and belts, were a most unpictu- 
resque and unattractive element. They were neither dash- 
ing and bold, nor remorseful and repentant. 

They gambled foolishly, and«laughed when they won, 
and told the dealer he cheated when they lost. The men 
occasionally gave glimpses of the life which Bret Ilarte 
made dramatic and picturesque- — the women, never. The 
most uncharacteristic thing of the place, and one which 
was Bret Hartish in every detail, was the service held in 
Watrous and Bannigan's gambling-saloon. The hall is a 



At a New Mining Camp 

very long one witli a saloon facing the street, and keno 
tables, and a dozen other games in the gambling-room be- 
yond. When the doors between the two rooms are held 
back they make a very large hall. A clergyman asked Wat- 
rous if he could have the use of the gambling-hall on Sunday 
night. The house was making about three hundred dollars 
an hour, and Watrous calculated that half an hour would 
be as much as he could afford towards the collection. He 
mounted a chair and said, " Boys, this gentleman wants 
to make a few remarks to you of a religious nature. All 
the games at that end of the hall will stop, and you want 
to keep still." 

The clergyman stood on the platform of the keno outfit, 
and the greater part of the men took the seats around it, 
toying with the marking cards scattered over the table 
in front of them, while the men in the saloon crowded the 
doorway from the swinging-doors to the bar, and looked on 
with curious and amused faces. At the back of the room 
the roulette wheel clicked and the ball rolled. The men 
in this part of the room who were playing lowered their 
voices, but above the voice of the preacher one could 
hear the clinking of the silver and the chips, and the voice 
of the boy at the wheel calling, " seventeen and black, and 
twenty-eight and black again and — keep the ball rolling, 
gentlemen — and four and red." There are two electric 
lights in the middle of the hall and a stove ; the men were 
crowded closely around this stove, and the lamps shone 
through the smoke on their tanned upturned faces and on 
the white excited face of the preacher above them. There 
was the most excellent order, and the collection was very 
large. I asked Watrous how much he lost by the interrup- 
tion. 



The West from a Car - Window 

" Nothing," he said, quickly, anxious to avoid the ap- 
pearance of good ; '' I got it all back at the bar." 

Of the inner life of Creede I saw nothing; I mean the 
real business of the place— the speculation in real estate 
and in mines. Capitalists came every day, and were car- 
ried off np the mountains to look at a hole in the ground, 
and down again to see the assay tests of the ore taken' 
from it. Prospectors scoured the sides of the mountains 
from sundawn to sunset, and at night their fires lit up the 
range, and their little heaps of stone and their single stick, 
with their name scrawled on it in pencil, made the mount- 
ains look like great burying -grounds. All of the land 
within two miles of Creede was claimed by these simple 
proofs of ownership— simple, yet as effectual as a parch- 
ment sealed and signed. AYhen the snow has left the 
mountains, and these claims can be worked, it will be time 
enough to write the real history of the rise or fall of 
Creede. 



ly 

A THREE-YEAR-OLD CITY 



A Three -Year -Old City 



IV 



A THREE-YEAR-OLD CITY 




HE only interest wliicli the East can take in 
Oklahoma City for some time to come must 
be the same as that with which one regards a 
f$^^ portrait finished by a lightning crayon artist, 
" with frame complete," in ten minutes. AYe may have 
seen better portraits and more perfect coloring, but we 
have never watched one completed, as it were, " while 
you wait." People long ago crowded to see Master Bet- 
ty act, not because there were no better actors in those 
days, but because he was so very young to do it so very 
well. It was as a freak of nature, a Josef Hoffman of the 
drama, that they considered him, and Oklahoma City must 
content itself with being only of interest as yet as a freak 
of our civilization. 

After it has decided which of the half-dozen claimants to 
each of its town sites is the only one, and the others have 
stopped appealing to higher and higher courts, and have 
left the law alone and have reduced their attention strictly 
to business, and the city has been burned down once or 
twice, and had its Treasurer default and its Mayor im- 
peached, and has been admitted to the National Baseball 
League, it may hope to be regarded as a full-grown rival 
city ; but at present, as far as it concerns the far East, it 

03 



The West from a Car - Window 










V-T-Ji' ■ 



OKrAHOMA CITV ON THK PAY OF THE OPENING 

is interesting cliiefly as a city that o;i'e\Y up overniglit, and 
did in three years or less what other towns liave accom- 
plished only after half a century. 

The history of its pioneers and their invasion of their 
undiscovered country not only shows how far the AVest is 
from the East, hut how much we have changed our ways of 
doing things from the days of the Pilgrim Fathers to those 
of the modern pilgrims, the "boomers " and "sooners" of 
the end of the century. AVe have seen pictures in our 
school-books, and pictures which Mr. Bough ton has made 
for us, of the Mayflower\ people kneeling on the shore, the 
long, anxious voyage behind them, and the "rock-bound 
coast" of their new home before them, with the Indians 
looking on doubtfully from behind the pine-trees. It makes 
a very interesting picture — those stern-faced pilgrims in 
their knickerbockers and broad white collars ; each man 
strong in the consciousness that he has resisted persecution 

94 



J Three -Tear -Old City 

and overcome the perils of the sea, and is ready to meet 
the perils of an unknown land. I should like you to place 
in contrast with this the openinjr of Oklahoma Territory to 
the new white settlers three years ago. These modern pil- 
grims stand in rows twenty deep, separated from the prom- 
ised land not by an ocean, but by a line scratched in the 
earth with the point of a soldier's bayonet. The long row 
toeing this line are bending forward, panting with excite- 
ment, and looking with greedy eyes towards the new 
Canaan, the women with their dresses tucked up to their 
knees, the men stripped of coats and waistcoats for the 
coming race. And then, a trumpet call, answered by a 
thousand hungry yells from all along the line, and hundreds 
of men and women on foot and on horseback break away 
across the prairie, the stronger pushing down the weak, and 
those on horseback riding over and in some cases killing 
those on foot, in a mad, unseemly race for something which 
they are getting for nothing. These pilgrims do not drop 
on one knee to give thanks decorously, as did Columbus 
according to the twenty-dollar bills, but fall on both knees, 
and hammer stakes into the ground and pull them up again, 
and drive them down somewhere else, at a place which 
they hope will eventually become a corner lot facing the 
post-office, and drag up the next man's stake, and threaten 
him with a Winchester because he is on thei?- land, which 
they have owned for the last three minutes. And there 
are no Indians in this scene. They have been paid one 
dollar and twenty-five cents an acre for the Ian 1, which is 
worth five dollars an acre as it lies, before a spade has 
been driven into it or a bit of timber cut, and they are 
safely out of the way. 

Oklahoma Territory, which lies in the most fertile part 



The West from a Car - Windoiv 

of the Indian Territory, equally distant from Kansas and 
Texas, was thrown open to white settlers at noon on the 
22d of April, 1889. To appreciate the Oklahoma City of 
this day, it is necessary to go back to the Oklahoma of 
three years ago. The city at that time consisted of a rail- 
road station, a section house and water-tank, the home of 
the railroad agent, and four other small buildings. The rest 
was prairie-land, with low curving hills covered with high 
grass and bunches of thick timber ; this as far as the eye 
could see, and nothing else. This land, which is rich and 
black and soft, and looks like chocolate where the plough 
has turned the sod, was thrown open by the proclamation 
of the President to white settlers, who could on such a day, 
at such an hour, '' enter and occupy it" for homestead 
holdings. A homestead holding is one hundred and sixty 
acres of land. The proclamation said nothing about town 
sites, or of the division of town sites into " lots " for stores, 
or of streets and cross-streets. But several bodies of men 
in different parts of Kansas prepared plans long before the 
opening, for a town to be laid out around the station, the 
water-tank, and the other buildings where Oklahoma City 
now stands, and had their surveyors and their blue prints 
hidden away in readiness for the 22d of April. All of those 
who intended to enter this open-to-all-comers race for land 
knew that the prairie around the station would be laid out 
into lots. Hence that station and other stations which in 
time would become cities were the goals for which over 
forty thousand people raced from the borders of the new 
Territory. So many of these " beat the pistol " on the 
start and reached the goal first that, in consequence, the 
efforts ever since to run this race over again through 
the law courts has kept Oklahoma City from growing 



A Three-Year-Old City 

with even more marvellous rapidity than it already has 
done. 

The Sunday before the 22d was a warm brio^ht day, and 
promised well for the morrow. Soldiers and deputy mar- 
shals were the only living beings in sight around the station, 
and those who tried to descend from passing trains were 
pushed back again at the point of the bayonet. The course 
was being kept clear for the coming race. But freight cars 
loaded with raw lumber and furniture and all manner of 
household goods, as well as houses themselves, ready to be 
put together like the joints of a trout rod, were allowed free 
entry, and stood for a mile along the side-track awaiting 
their owners, who were hugging the border lines from fifteen 
to thirty miles away. Captain D. F. Stiles, of the Tenth 
Infantry, who had been made provost marshal of the new 
Territory, and whose soldiers guarded the land before and 
maintained peace after the invasion, raised his telescope at 
two minutes to twelve on the eventful 22d of April, and saw 
nothing from the station to the horizon but an empty green 
prairie of high waving grass. It would take the first horse 
(so he and General Merritt and his staff in their private car 
on the side-track decided) at least one hour and a quarter 
to cover the fifteen miles from the nearest border. They ac- 
cordingly expected to catch the first glimpse of the leaders 
in the race with their glasses in about half an hour. The 
signal on the border was a trumpet call given by a cavalry- 
man on a white horse, which he rode in a circle in order 
that those who were too far away to hear the trumpet 
might see that it had been sounded. A like signal was 
given at the station ; but before it had died away, and not 
half an hour later, five hundred men sprang from the long 
grass, dropped from the branches of trees, crawled from 

9'J 



The West from a Car - Windoio 

under freight cars and out of canons and ditches, and the 
blank prairie became alive with men running and racing 
about like a pack of beagles that have suddenly lost a hot 
trail. 

Fifteen minutes after twelve the men of the Seminole 
Land and Town Company were dragging steel chains up the 
street on a run, the red and white barber poles and the 
transits were in place all over the prairie, and neat little 
rows of stakes stretched out in regular lines to mark where 
they hoped the town might be. At twenty minutes after 
twelve over forty tents were in position, and the laud around 
them marked out by wooden pegs. This was the work of 
the " sooners," as those men were called who came into the 
Territory too soon, not for their own interests, but for the 
interests of other people. At a quarter past one the Rev. 
James Murray and a Mr. Kincaid, who represented the Ok- 
lahoma Colony, stopped a sweating horse and creaking 
buggy and hammered in their first stakes. They had left 
the border line exactly at noon, and had made the fifteen 
miles at the rate of five minutes per mile. Four minutes later 
J. H. McCortney and Colonel Harrison, of Kansas, arrived 
from the Canadian River, having whipped their horses for 
fifteen miles, and the mud from the river was over the hubs 
of the wheels. The first train from the south reached the 
station at five minutes past two, and unloaded twenty- 
five hundred people. They scattered like a stampeded herd 
over the prairie, driving in their little stakes, and changing 
their minds about it and driving them in again at some 
other point. There were already, even at this early period 
of the city's history, over three different men on each lot 
of ground, each sitting by the stake bearing his name, and 
each calling the other a " sooner," and there^e one ineli- 

100 







KW 










vi 



i\ %\m 



fi 



',^^ \VtkA__,, ,i'i 




^ ,^\\''/ ^t-^. '?'-^^' 



1 1 Jf^l I 



^ ^ ' I 1 Via ^ -I > iM-* 



' «:nj.:^'?i 



A Three -Year -Old CiUj 

gible to hold land, and many other names of more ancient 
usage. 

Bat there was no blood shed even during the greatest 
excitement of that feverish afternoon. This was in great 
part due to the fact that the provost marshal confiscated 
all the arms he saw. At three o'clock the train from the 
north arrived with hundreds more hanging from the steps 
and crowding the aisles. The sight of so many others who 
had beaten them m the race seemed to drive these late- 
comers almost frantic, and they fell over one another in 
their haste, and their race for the choicest lots was like a 
run on a bank when no one knows exactly where the bank 
is. One young woman was in such haste to alight that she 
crawled out of the car window, and as soon as she reached 
the solid earth beneath, drove m her stake and claimed all 
the land around it. This was part of the military reserva- 
tion, and the soldiers explained this to her, or tried to, 
but she was suspicious of every one, and remained seated 
by her wooden peg until nightfall. She could just as 
profitably have driven it into the centre of Union Square. 
Another woman stuck up a sign bearing the words, **A 
Soldier's Widow's Land," and was quite confident that the 
chivalry of the crowd would respect that title. Captain 
Stiles told her that he thought it would not, and showed 
her a lot of ground still unclaimed that she could have, but 
she refused to move. The lot he showed her is now on the 
main street, in the centre of the town, and the lot she was 
finally forced to take is three miles out of the city in the 
prairie. Another woman drove her stake between the rail- 
road ties, and said it would take a locomotive and a train 
of cars to move her. One man put his stake in the very 
centre of the lot sites laid out by the surveyors, and claimed 

103 



The West from a Car - Windoio 

the one liuiidred and sixty acres around for Lis homestead 
holding. They explained to him that he could only have 
as much land as would make a lot in the town site, and that 
if he wanted one hundred and sixty acres, must locate it 
o.itside of the city limits. He replied that the proclamation 
said nothing about town sites. 

" But, of course," he went on, " if you people want to 
build a city around my farm, I have no objections. I don't 
care for city life myself, and I am going to turn this into a 
vegetable garden. Maybe, though, if you want it very bad, 
I might sell it." 

He and the city fought it out for months, and, for all I 
know, are at it still. At three o'clock, just three hours after 
the Territory was invaded, the Oklahoma Colony declared 
the polls open, and voting began for Mayor and City Clerk. 
About four hundred people voted. Other land companies 
at once held public meetings and protested against this 
election. Each land company was mapping out and sur- 
veying the city to suit its own interests, and every man and 
woman was more or less of a land company to himself or her- 
self, and the lines and boundaries and streets were inter- 
secting and crossing like the lines of a dress pattern. 
Night came on and put a temporary hush to this bedlam, 
and six thousand people went to sleep in the open air, the 
greater part of them without shelter. There was but one 
well in the city, and word was brought to Captain Stiles 
about noon of the next day that the water from this was 
being sold by a speculative gentleman at five cents per pint, 
and that those who had no money were suffering. Captain 
Stiles found the well guarded by a faro-dealer with a re- 
volver. He had a tin basin between his knees filled with 
nickels. Ele argued that he owned the lot on which the 

104 



A Three -Year -Old City 




CAPTAIN D. F. STILES 

water stood, and bad as much private right to the well as 
to a shaft that led down to a silver or an iron mine. Cap- 
tain Stiles threw him and his basin out at some distance on 
to the prairie, and detailed a corporal's guard to see that 
every one should get as much water as he wanted. 

During the morning there was an attempt made to in- 
duce the surveyors of the different land companies to com- 
bine and readjust their different plans, but without success. 
Innally, at three o'clock, the people came together in des- 
peration to decide what was to be done, and, after an 
amusing and exciting mass-meeting, fourteen unhappy and 

105 



The West from a Car - Wiiidoiv 

prominent citizens were selected to agree upon an entirely 
new site. The choosing of this luckless fourteen was ac- 
complished by general nomination, each nominee haying 
first to stand upon a box that he might be seen and con- 
sidered by the crowd. They had to submit to such em- 
barrassing queries as, " Where are you from, and why did 
you haye to leaye ?" " Where did you get that hat ?" 
"What is your excuse for liying?" "Do you liye with 
your folks, or does your wife support you ?" " What was 
your other name before you came here ?" The work of this 
committee began on the morrow, and as they slowly pro- 
ceeded along the new boundary lines which they had 
mapped out, they were followed by all of those of the 
population, which now amounted to ten thousand souls, 
who thought it safe to leaye their claims. As a rule, they 
found three men on each lot, and it was their pleasant duty 
to decide to which of these the lot belonged. They did 
this on the eyidence of those who had lots near by. In 
many cases, each member of each family had selected a lot 
for himself, and this complicated matters still farther. The 
crowd at last became so importunate and noisy that the 
committee asked for a military guard, which was giyen 
them, and the crowd after that was at least kept off the lot 
they were considering. The committee met with no real 
opposition until it reached Main Street on Saturday, the 
fifth day of the city's life, where those who had settled 
along the lines laid down by the Seminole Land Company 
pulled up the stakes of the citizens' committee as soon as 
they were driyen down. For a time it looked yery much 
as though the record of peace was about to be broken 
along with other things, but a committee of fiye men from 
each side of the street (lecided the matter at a meeting held 

106 



A Three -Year -Old City 

that afternoon. At this same public meeting articles of 
confederation were adopted, and a temporary Mayor, Re- 
corder, Police Judge, and other city officials were appointed, 
who were to receive one dollar for their services. This 
meeting closed with cheers and with the singing of the 
doxology. 

The next day was Sunday, and was more or less observed. 
Captain Stiles visited the gamblers, who swarmed about 
the place in great numbers, and asked them to close their 
tables, which they did, although he had no power to stop 
them if they had not wished to do so. In the afternoon 
two separate religious services were held, to which the 
people were called by a trumpeter from the infantry camp. 

This is, in brief, the history of the first week of this new 
city. There were, considering the circumstances, but few 
disturbances, and there was no drunkenness. This is dis- 
appointing, but true. Both came later. But at the first no 
one cared to shoot the gentleman on the other end of his 
lot, lest the man on the next lot might prove to be a rela- 
tive of his, and begin to shoot too. Later on, when every- 
body became better acquainted, the shooting was more 
general. They could not easily get anything to drink, as 
Captain Stiles seized all the liquor, and when it came in 
vessels of unmanageable size that could not be stored away, 
spilled it over the prairie. In two weeks over one thousand 
buildings were enclosed, and there would have been more 
if there had been more lumber. 

It would be interesting to follow the course of this sky- 
rocket among cities up to the present day, and tell how 
laws were evolved and courts established, and the complex- 
ities of the situation disentangled ; but that is work for one 
of the many bright young men who write monographs on 



The West from a Car - Window 

economic subjects at the Johns Hopkins University. It is 
just the sort of work in which they delight, and which they 
do well, and they will find raany " oldest inhabitants " of 
tliis three-year-old city to take equal delight in telling them 
of these early days, and in explaining the rights and wrongs 
of their individual lawsuits against their city and their 
neighbors. 

It is impossible, in considering the founding of Oklaho- 
ma, to overrate the services of Captain Stiles. Seldom has 
the case of the right man in the right place been so happily 
demonstrated. He was particularly fitted to the work, al- 
though I doubt if the Government knew of it before he was 
sent there, so apt is it to get the square peg in the round 
hole, unless the square peg's uncle is a Senator. But Cap- 




POST OFFICE, APRIL 22, 188!) 



A Three-Year -Old Citij 

tain Stiles, when he was a lieutenant, had ruled at Waco, 
Texas, during the reconstruction period, and the questions 
and difficulties that arose after the war in that raw com- 
munity fitted him to deal with similar ones in the con- 
struction of Oklahoma. He was and is intensely unpopular 
with the worst element in Oklahoma, and the better element 
call him blessed, and have presented him with a three-hun- 
dred dollar gold cane, which is much too fine for him to 
carry except in clear weather. This is the way public senti- 
ment should be adjusted. Personal bravery had, I think, as 
much to do with his success as the readiness with which 
he met the difficulties he had to solve at a moment's con- 
sideration. Several times he walked up to the muzzles of re- 
volvers with which desperadoes covered him and wrenched 
them out of their owners' hands. He never interfered 
between the people and the civil hxw, and resisted the 
temptation of misusing his authority in a situation where a 
weaker man would have lost his head and abused his power. 
He was constantly appealed to to settle disputes, and his 
invariable answer was, " I am not here to decide which of 
you owns that lot, but to keep peace between you until it 
is decided." In September of 1889 a number of disaffected 
citizens announced an election which was to overthrow 
those then in power, and Captain Stiles was instructed by 
his superior officers to prevent its taking place. This he 
did with a small force of men in the face of threats from 
the most dangerous element in the community of dynamite 
bombs and of a body of men armed with Winchesters who 
were to shoot him first and his men later. But in spite of 
this he visited and broke all the voting booths, wrested a 
Winchester from the liands of the man who pointed it at his 
heart through one of the windows of the polling-place, and 

100 



Tlte Went from a Car - Window 

finally charged the mob of five hundred men with twenty- 
five soldiers and his fighting surgeon, young Dr. Ives, and 
dispersed them uttterly. I heard these stories of him on 
every side, and I was rejoiced to think how well off our 
army must be in majors, that the people at Washington 
can allow one who has served through the war and on tlie 
border and in this unsettled Territory, and whose hair has 
grown white in the service, to still wear two bars on his 
shoulder-strap. 

It is much more pleasant to write of these early days of 
Oklahoma City than of the Oklahoma City of the present, 
although one of its citizens would not find it so, for he re- 
gards his adopted home with a fierce local pride and jeal- 
ousy almost equal to a Chicagoan's love for Chicago, whicli 
is saying a very great deal. But to the transient visitor 
Oklahoma City of to-day, after he has recovered from the 
shock its extent and solidity give him, is dispiriting and 
unprofitable to a degree. This may partly be accounted 
for by the circumstance that his only means of entering it 
from the south by train is, or was at the time I visited it, 
at four o'clock in the morning. No one, after having been 
dragged out of his berth and dropped into a cold misty 
well of darkness, punctured only by the light from the 
brakeman's lantern and a smoking omnibus lamp, is in a 
mood to grow enthusiastic over the city about him. And 
the fact that the hotel is crowded, and that he must sleep 
with the barkeeper, does not tend to raise his spirits. I 
can heartily recommend this method of discouraging im- 
migration to the authorities of any already overcrowded 
city. 

But as the sun comes up, one sees the remarkable growth 
of this city — remarkable not only for its extent in so short 

110 



A Three -Vear- Old City 




POST-OFFICK, JULV 4, 1890 



a period, but for tlie come-to-stay air about many of its 
buildings. There are stone banks and stores, and an opera- 
house, and rows of brick buildings with dwelling-rooms 
above, and in the part of the city where the people go 
to sleep hundreds of wooden houses, fashioned after the 
architecture of the sea-shore cottages of the Jersey coast ; 
for the climate is mild the best part of the year. There are 
also churches of stone and brick and stained glass, and a 
flour-mill, and three or four newspapers, and courts of law, 

and boards of trade. But with all of these things, which 

111 



The West from a Car - Window 

show a steadily improving growth after the mushroom nature 
of Its birth, Oklahoma City cannot or has not yet shaken off 
the attributes with which it was born, and which in a com- 
munity founded by law and purchase would not exist For 
speculation in land, whether in lots on the main street or 
m homestead holdings on the prairie, and the excitement 
of real estate transfers, and the battle for rights in the 
courts, seem to be the prevailing and ruling passion of the 
place. Gambling in real estate is as much in the air as is 
the spirit of the Louisiana State Lottery in New Orleans 
Every one in Oklahoma City seems to liVe, in part at least* 
by transferring real estate to some one else, and the lawyers 
and real-estate agents live by helping them to do it It 
reminded me of that happy island in the Pacific seas where 
every one took in every one else's washing. Tins may 
sound unfair, but it is not in the least exaggerated. The 
town swarms with lawyers, and is overrun with real-estate 
offices. The men you meet and the men you pass in the 
street are not discussing the weather or the crops or the 
news of the outside world, but you hear them say • " I'll 
appeal it, by God !" - I'll spend every cent IVe got, sir P' 
" They're a lot of ' sooners,' and I can prove it !" or, " Ted 
Hillman's lot on Prairie Avenue, that he sold for tJo hun- 
dred dollars, rose to three hundred in one week, and Abner 
Brown says he won't take six hundred for it now." 

This is only the natural and fitting outcome of the bun- 
gling, incomplete bill which, rushed through at the hot 
hurried end of a session, authorized the opening of this' 
territory. The President might with equal judgment have 
proclaimed that -The silver vaults of the United States 
Treasury will be opened on the 22d of April, when citizens 
can enter m and take away one hundred and sixty silver 



A Three -Year -Old City 

dollars each," without providing laws to prevent or punish 
those who entered before that date, or those who snatched 
more than their share. One would think that some dis- 
tinction might have been made, in opening this new land, 
between those who came with family and money and stock, 
meaning to settle permanently, and those who took the 
morning train from Kansas in order to rush in and snatch a 
holding, only to sell it again in three hours and to return 
to their homes that night ; between those who brought 
capital, and desperadoes and " boot-leggers " who came to 
make capital out of others. If the land was worth giving 
away, it was worth giving to those who would make the 
best use of it, and worth surrounding with at least as much 
order as that which distinguishes the fight of the Harvard 
Seniors for the flowers on Class day. They are going to 
open still more territory this spring, and in all probability 
the same confusion will arise and continue, and it is also 
probable that many persons in the East may be attracted 
by the announcements and advertisements of the " boom- 
ers " to this new land. 

The West is always full of hope to the old man as well 
as to the young one, and the temptation to " own your own 
home " and to gain land for the asking is very great. But 
the Eastern man should consider the question very care- 
fully. There is facing the passenger who arrives on the 
New York train at Sedalia a large black and white sign on 
which some philanthropist has painted " Go East, Young 
Man, Go East." One might write pages and not tell more 
than that sign does, when one considers where it is placed 
and for what purpose it is placed there. 

A man in Oklahoma City when the day's work is done 
has before him a prospect of broad red clayey streets, 

n 113 



The West from a Car - Window 

muddy after rain, bristling with dust after a drought, with 
the sun setting at one end of them into the prairie. He can 
go to his cottage, or to " The Turf," where he can lose some 
money at faro, or he can sit in one of the hotels, which are 
the clubs of the city, and talk cattle to strangers and real 
estate to citizens, or he can join a lodge and talk real estate 
there. Once or twice a week a " show " makes a one-night 
stand at the opera-house. The schools are not good for his 
children as yet, and the society that he is willing his wife 
should enjoy is limited. On Sunday he goes to church, 
and eats a large dinner in the middle of the day, and walks 
up to the top of the hill to look over the prairie where he 
and many others would like to build, but which must re- 
main empty until the twelve different disputants for each 
holding have stopped appealing to higher courts. This is 
actually the case, and the reason the city has not spread as 
others around it have done. As the Romans shortened 
their swords to extend their boundaries, so the people of 
Oklahoma City might cut down some of their higher courts 
and increase theirs. 

I have given this sketch of Oklahoma City as it impressed 
itself on me, because I think any man who can afford a 
hall bedroom and a gas-stove in New York City is better 
off than he would be as the owner of one hundred and sixty 
acres on the prairie, or in one of these small so-called cities. 

And the men w^ho are at the head of affairs, who rose out 
of the six thousand in a week, and who have kept at the 
head ever since, if they had exerted the same energy, and 
showed the same executive ability and the same cleverness 
in a real city, would be real mayors, real merchants, and 
real "prominent citizens." They are now as men playing 
with children's toys or building houses of cards. Every 

114 



A Three -Tear -Old City 

now and then a Roger Q. Mills or a Henry W. Grady comes 
out of the South and West, and among these politicians 
and first citizens o-f Oklahoma City are men who only need 
a broader canvas and a greater opportunity to show what 
they can do. There are as many of these as there are un- 
couth " Sockless " Simpsons, or noisy Ingallses, and it is 
pathetic and exasperating to see men who would excel in 
a great metropolis, and who could live where they could 
educate their children and themselves, and be in touch 
with the world moving about them, even though they were 
not of it, wasting their energies in a desert of wooden 
houses in the middle of an ocean of prairie, where their 
point of vieAv is bounded by the railroad tank and a barb- 
wire fence. It depends altogether on the man. There are 
men who are just big enough to be leading citizens of a 
town of six thousand inhabitants, who are meant for noth- 
ing else, and it is just as well they should be satisfied with 
the unsettled existence around them ; but it would be better 
for these others to be small men in a big city than big men 
on a prairie, where the organ in the front room is their art 
gallery, book-store, theatre, church, and school, and where 
the rustling grass of the prairie greets them in the morn- 
ing and goes to bed with them at night. 



Y 
RANCH LIFE IN TEXAS 



Ranch Life in Texas 



KANCH LIFE IN TEXAS 




I HE inliabited part of a ranch, tbe part of it on 
wlucli the people who own it live, bears about 
the same proportion to the rest of the ranch 
^^..^a. as a light-house does to the ocean around it. 
And to an Eastern man it appears almost as lonelj-. 
Some lio-ht- houses are isolated in the ocean, some stand 
in bays,^ and some in harbors; and in the same propor- 
tion the ranches in Texas differ in size, from pnncpaU- 
ties to farms no larger than those around Jersey City ihe 
simile is not altogether exact, as there are small bodies of 
men constantly leaving the "ranch-house" and wandermg 
about over the range, sleeping wherever night catches them 
and in this way different parts of the ranch are inhabited 
as well as the house itself. It is as if the light -house- 
keeper sent out a great number of row-boKts to look after 
the floating buoys or to catch fish, and the men ,n those 
boats anchored whenever it grew dark, and returned to the 
light -house variously as best suited their convenience or 
their previous orders. . 

But it is the loneliness of the life that will most certainly 
first impress the visitor from closely built blocks of houses. 
Those who live on the ranches will tell you that theyflo 
not find it lonely, and that they grow so fond of the great 



no We,t from a Car-Wimtox, 
breezy pastures abont them that they become independent 
of the rest of mankind, and tl,at a trip to the city I 1 , 
year to go to the play and to " shop " 1 all ti, ^, ! 
the % world ,yin, ..tside of thelrb:' Lf ^ 
.peakmg now of those ranch-owners onlv who ii ve on t " 
g«. -« not of those who hire a fo.man, an I^'d 
heir time and money in the San Antonio Clnb They J^^e 
more ranchmen tlian the absentee landlord who Ii 4 n 
Ins London honse is a gentleman farmer. 

The largest ranch in the United States ..„^ , , , . 
the world, owned by one person s tTe^'andt' '" 

It hes fortj-five nnles south of Corpus Christi 

lie ladies who come to call on Mrs. Kin., drive fron, 

her ront gate, over as good a road as anv in Ce P , 

or ten miles before they arrive at her f^nt door and the' 

bntcher and baker and iceman, if such e.visted, w ou d h ve 

o dnve thirty miles from the back gate before he ea b d 

W Intchen. TMs ranch is bounded by the Corpls Chr st 

m fes Ir M" " ''"' '' '^^'-""-^ ^- three hundred 
nules more. It covers seven hundred thousand acres in 
extent, and one hundred thousand head of cattle a,^ tl r 
ti^o^isand broodmares wander over its ditferenl pas res 

This property ,s under the ruling of Robert J. Kleb;ro. 
lis King's son.n-law, and he has under him a super ntf 
clent, or, as the Mexicans call one who holds tha !ffl 
-ior-domo, which is an unusual position f, ^o^l' 
as this major-domo has the charge of three himdred ::; 
boys and twelve hundred ponies reserved for thel usl" 
The -.U.dowV ranch, as the Texans call it is a e e 
my organi-zed and moves on as conservative bliness ^ „ 
eiples as a bank. The cowboys do not ride overTsra ge' 



Ranch Life in Texas 

with both legs at right angles to the saddle and shooting 
joyfully into the air with both guns at once. Neither do 
they offer the casual visitor a bucking pony to ride, and 
then roll around on the prairie with glee ^vhen he is shot 
up into the air and comes down on his collar-bone ; they 
are more likely to bring him as fine a Kentucky thorough- 
bred as ever wore a blue ribbon around the Madison Square 
Garden. Neither do they shoot at his feet to see if he 
can dance. In this way the Eastern man is constantly find- 
ing his dearest illusions abruptly dispelled. It is also try- 
ing when the cowboys stand up and take off their sombreros 
when one is leaving their camp. There are cowboys and 
cowboys, and I am speaking now of those that I saw on 
the King ranch. 

The thing that the wise man from the East cannot at 
first understand is how the one hundred thousand head of 
cattle wandering at large over the range are ever collected 
together. He sees a dozen or more steers here, a bunch of 
horses there, and a single steer or two a mile off, and even 
as he looks at them they disappear in the brush, and as 
far as his chance of finding them again would be, they 
might as well stand forty miles away at the other end of 
the ranch. But this is a very simple problem to the ranch- 
man. 

Mr. Kleberg, for instance, receives an order from a firm 
in Chicago calling for one thousand head of cattle. The 
breed of cattle which the firm wants is grazing in a corner of 
the range fenced in by barb -wire, and marked pale blue for 
convenience on a beautiful map blocked out in colors, like 
a patch- work quilt, which hangs in Mr. Kleberg's otfice. 
When the order is received, he sends a Mexican on a pony to 
tell the men near that particular pale blue pasture to round 

125 



. The West from a Car Window 

up one thousand head of cattle, and at the same time directs 
h,s superintendent to send in a few days as manv cowboys 
to that pasture as are needed to " hold " one thousand head 
of cattle on the way to the railroad station. The boys on 
the pasture, which we will suppose is ten miles square, will 
take ten of their number and five extra ponies apiece, which 
one man leads, and from one to another of which they 
«lnft their saddles as men do in polo, and go directly to 
the water-tanks in the ten square miles of land. A "cow 
will not often wander more than two and a half miles from 
water, and so, with the water -tank (which on the Kinsr 
ranch may be either a well with a wind-mill or a dammed 
canon full of rain-water) as a rendezvous, the finding of the 
cattle IS comparatively easy, and ten men can round np one 
thousand head in a day or two. When thev have them all 
together, the cowboys who are to drive them to the station 
arrive, and take them oflf. 

At the station the agent of the Chicago firm and the 
agent of the King ranch ride through th; herd together, 
and If they disagree as to the fitness of any one or more of 
tlie cattle, an outsider is called in, and his decision is final. 
Ihe cattle are then driven on to the cars, and Mr. Kleberg's 
responsibility is at an end. 

In the spring there is a general rounding np, and thou- 
sands and thousands of steers are brought in from the dif- 
ferent pastures, and those for which contracts have been 
made during the winter are shipped off to the markets, and 
the calves are branded. 

Texas is the great breeding State from which the cattle 
are sent north to the better pasture land of Kansas, Mon- 
tana and Wyoming Territory, to be fattened up for the 
markets. The breeding goes on throughout the year, five 




A SIUTTERK.n IPOL 



Ranch Life in Texas 

bulls being pastured with every three hundred cows, in 
pastures of from one thousand to ten thousand acres in ex- 
tent. About ninety per cent, of the cows calve, and the 
branding of these calves is one of the most important duties 
of the spring work. They are driven into a pen through a 
wooden chute, and as they leave the chute are caught by 
the legs and thrown over on the side, and one of a dozen 
hot irons burning in an open fire is pressed against the 
tlank, and, on the King ranch, on the nose. 

An animal bearing one of the rough hall-marks of the 
ranchman is* more respected than a dog with a silver collar 
around his neck, and the number of brands now registered 
in the State capital runs up to the thousands. On some 
ranches each of the family has his or her especial brand ; 
and one young girl who came out in New York last winter 
is known throughout low^er Texas only as " the owner of 
the Triangle brand," and is much respected in consequence, 
as it is borne by thousands of wandering cattle. The sep- 
arating of the cattle at the spring round-up is accomplished 
on the King ranch by means of a cutting pen, a somewhat 
ingenious trap at the end of a chute. One end of this 
chute opens on the prairie, and the other runs into four 
different pens guarded by a swinging gate, so hung that by 
a movement of the foot by the man siting over the gate 
the chute can be extended into any one of the four pens. 
With this mules, steers, horses, and ponies can be fed into 
the chute together, and each arrive in his proper pen until 
the number for which the different orders call is filled. 

It is rather difficult to imagine one solitary family oc- 
cupying a territory larger than some of the Eastern States 
— an area of territory that w^ould in the East support a 
State capital, with a Governor and Legislature, and numer- 



The West from a Car -Window 

o"s s„,all towns, with competing railroad systems and rival 
baseball n.nes. And all that may be said of this side of 
the question of ranch life is that when we are within Mr. 

o^hTt T ",T" '""''"' ■■' "^^ -" "' twenty 

a d a?:. :;^ """" '° ^'""'-^^^ °" *^-'-" ^venne' 
and tha the d,s ant ery of the coyotes at night is all tha 

;::etr;:r^~-^-'-^^'"^-'p-^''ownhe- 







SNAPPING A ROPE ON A HORSP's FOOT 



i 



Ranch Life in Texas 

In the suinincr this ranch is covered with green, and little 
yellow and pink flowers carpet the range for miles. It is 
at its best then, and is as varied and beautiful in its 
changes as the ocean. 

The ranches that stretch along and away from the Rio 
Grande River are very different from this ; they are owned 
by Mexicans, and every one on the ranch is a Mexican ; the 
country is desolate here, and dead and dying cattle are 
everywhere. 

No ranch - owner, whether he has fifty thousand or five 
hundred head of cattle, will ever attempt to help one that 
may be ailing or dying. This seems to one who has been 
taught the value of "three acres and a cow " the height of 
extravagance, and to show lack of feeling. But they will 
all tell you it is useless to try to save a starving or a sick 
animal, and also that it is not worth the trouble, there are 
so many more. In one place I saw where a horse had fallen 
on the trail, and the first man who passed had driven 
around it, and the next, and the next, until a new trail was 
made, and at the time I passed over this new trail, I 
could see the old one showing through the ribs of the horse's 
skeleton. In the East, I think, they would have at least 
pulled the horse out of the road. 

But a live horse or steer is just as valuable in Texas as 
in the East — even more so. 

The conductor on the road from Corpus Christi sprang 
from his chair in the baggage car one day, and shouted to 
the engineer that he inust be careful, for we were on Major 
Fcnton's range, and must look out for the major's prize bull ; 
and the train continued at half speed accordingly until the 
conductor espied the distinguished animal well to the left, and 
shouted : "All right, Bill ! We've passed him, let her out." 

131 



The West from a Car - Window 

The Randado ranch is typical of the largest of the Mex- 
ican ranches whi-ch lie within the five hundred miles along 
the Rio Grande. It embraces eighty thousand acres, with 
twenty-five thousand head of cattle, and it has its store, its 
little mission, its tank, twenty or more adobe houses with 
thatched roofs, and its little graveyard. There is a post- 
office here, and a school, where very pretty little Mexicans 
recited proudly in English words of four letters. Around 
them lie the cactus and dense chaparral cut up with dusky 
trails, and the mail comes but twice a week. But every 
Saturday the vaqueros come in from the range, and there 
is dancing on the bare clay floor of one of the huts, and 
the school-master postmaster sings to them every evening 
on his guitar, and once a month the priest comes on horse- 
back to celebrate mass in the adobe mission. 

Around San Antonio are many ranches. These are more 
like large farms, and there are high trees and hills and a 
wonderful variety of flowers. There are also antelope and 
wild fowl for those who love to hunt, and the scalp of a 
coyote brings fifty cents to those who care for money ; for 
the coyotes pull down the young calves. The life on the 
range is not at all lonely here, for the women on the ranch 
do not mind riding in twelv^e miles to a dance in San An- 
tonio, and there are always people coming out from town 
to remain a day or two. The more successful of these 
ranches are like English country-houses in their free hos- 
pitality and in the constant changing of the guests. 

Many of these about San Antonio are owned, in fact, by 
Englishmen, although a record of the failures of the Eng- 
lish colonists of good family and of well-known youths 
from New York would make a book, and a very sad one. 
There was a whole colony of English families and unat- 

132 




:^^.v 



RaticJi Life in Texas 

tHolied younger sons at Bot'ino, just outside of San Antonio, 
a few years ago; but they preferred cutting to leg to cut- 
ting out cattle, and used the ponies to chase polo balls, and 
their money soon went, and they followed. Sonic went to 
England as prodigal sons, some to driving hacks and dealing 
faro, and others into the army. A few succeeded, and are 
still at Boerne, notably a cousin of Thomas Hughes, who 
founded the ill-fated English colony of Rugby, in Tennessee. 

Of the New York men who came on to San Antonio, the 
two Jacob boys are more frequently and more heartily 
spoken of by the Texans than almost any other Eastern 
men who have been there. They did not, as the others so 
often do, hire a foreman, and spend their days in the San 
Antonio Club, but rode the ranch themselves, and could 
cut out and brand and rope with any of those born on a 
range. Their ranch, the Santa Marta, still flourishes, al- 
though they have become absentee landlords, and have 
given up chasing wild steers in Texas in favor of the foxes 
at Rockaway. 

A ranch which marks the exception in the rule of failures 
of our English cousins is that of Alfred Giles in Kendal 
and Kerr counties. It covers about thirteen thousand acres, 
and a very fine breed of polled Angus cattle are bred on it. 
Indeed, the tendency all over Texas at present is to cultivate 
certain well-known breeds, and not, as formerly, to be con- 
tent w^ith the famous long-horned steer and the Texan pony. 
Mr. Giles's ranch, the " Ilillingdon, looks in the summer, 
when the imported Scotch cattle are grazing over it, like a 
bit out of the Lake country. Walnut, cherry, ash, and oak 
grow on this ranch, and the maidenhair-fern is everywhere, 
and the flowers are boundless in profusion and variety. 

The coming of the barb-wire fence and the railroad killed 
;35 



The West from a Car - Window 

the cowboy as a picturesque element of recklessness and 
lawlessness in south-west Texas. It suppressed him and 
localized him and limited him to his own range, and made 
his revolver merely an ornament. Before the barb -wire 
fence appeared, the cattle wandered from one range to an- 
other, and the man of fifteen thousand acres would over- 
stock, knowing that when his cattle could not find enough 
pasturage on his range they would move over to the range 
of his more prosperous neighbor. Consequently, when the 
men who could afford it began to fence their ranges, the 
smaller owners who had over- bred, saw that their cattle 
would starve, and so cut the fences in order to get back 
to the pastures which they had used so long. This, and 
the shutting off of water-tanks and of long-used trails 
brought on the barb-wire fence wars which raged long and 
fiercely between the cowboys and fence men of rival ranches 
and the Texas Rangers. The barb-wire fences did more 
than this ; they shut off the great trails that stretched from 
Corpus Christi through the Pan Handle of Texas, and on 
up through New Mexico and Colorado and through the 
Indian Territory to Dodge City. The coming of the rail- 
road also made this trailing of cattle to the markets super- 
fluous, and almost destroyed one of the most remarkable 
features of the West. This trail was not, of course, an 
actual trail, and marked as such, but a general driveway 
forty miles wide and thousands of miles long. The herds 
of cattle that were driven over it numbered from three 
hundred to three thousand head, and were moving con- 
stantly from the early spring to the late fall. 

No caravan route in the far Eastern countries can equal 
this six months' journey through three different States, and 
through all changes of weather and climate, and in the 

136 



t 



RiDU'li Life in 2\-x(LS 

face of constant danger and anxiety. This procession of 
countless cattle on their slow march to the north was one 
of the most interesting- and distinctive features of the West. 
x\n "outtit" for this expedition would consist of as 
many cowboys as were needed to liold the herd together, a 
wagon, with the cook and the tents, and extra ponies for 
the riders. In the morning the camp -wagon pushed on 
ahead to a suitable resting-place for the night, and when 
the herd arrived later, moving, on an average, fifteen miles 
a day, and grazing as it went, the men would find the sup- 
per ready and the tents pitched. And then those who 
were to watch that night would circle slowly around the 
great army of cattle, driving them in closer and closer to- 
gether, and singing as they rode, to put them to sleep. 
This seems an absurdity to the Eastern mind, but the fa- 
miliar sounds quieted and satisfied these great stupid ani- 
mals that can be soothed like a child with a nursery rhyme, 
and when frightened cannot be stopped by a river. The 
boys rode slowly and patiently until one and then an- 
other of the herd would stumble clumsily to the ground, 
and others near would follow, and at last the whole great 
herd would be silent and immovable in sleep. But the 
watchfulness of the sentries could never relax. Some 
chance noise — the shaking of a saddle, some cry of a wild 
animal, or the scent of distant water carried by a chance 
breeze across the prairie, or nothing but sheer blind wan- 
tonness — would start one of the sleeping mass to his feet 
with a snort, and in an instant the whole great herd would 
go tearing madly over the prairie, tossing their horns and 
bellowing, and filled with a wild, unreasoning terror. And 
then the skill and daring of the cowboy was put to its 
severest test, as he saw his master's income disappearing 



The West from a Car - Windoio 

towards a canon or a river, or to lose itself in the brush. 
And the cowboy who tried to head off and drive back 
this galloping army of frantic animals had to ride a race 
that meant his life if his horse made a misstep ; and as the 
horse's feet often did slip, there wonkl be found in the 
morning somewhere in the trail of the stampeding cattle a 
horrid mass of blood and flesh and leather. 

Do you wonder, then, after this half-year of weary, rest- 
less riding by day, and sleepless anxiety and watching 
under the stars by night, that when the lights of Dodge 
City showed across the prairie, the cowboy kicked his feet 
out of his stirrups, drove the blood out of the pony's sides, 
and " came in to town " with both guns going at once, and 
yelling as though the pent-up speech of the past six months 
of loneliness was striving for proper utterance ? 

The cowboy cannot be overestimated as a picturesque 
fiorure ; all that has been written about him and all the il- 
lustrations that have been made of him fail to familiarize 
him, and to spoil the picture he makes when one sees him 
for the first time racing^ across a rangje outlined ao^ainst the 
sky, with his handkerchief flying out behind, his sombrero 
bent back by the wind, and his gauntlets and broad leather 
leggings showing above and at the side of his galloping 
pony. And his deep seat in the saddle, with his legs hang- 
ing straight to the long stirrups, the movement of his body 
as it sways and bends, and his utter unconsciousness of 
the animal beneath him would make a German riding-master, 
an English jockey, or the best cross-country rider of a Long 
Island hunting club shake his head in envy and despair. 

He is a fantastic-looking individual, and one suspects he 
wears the strange garments he affects because he knows 
they are most becoming. B:it there is a reason for each 

140 



Ranch Life hi Texas 

of the different parts of his apparel, in spite of rather than 
on account of their pictiiresqueness. The sombrero shades 
his face from the rain and sun, the rattlesnake-skin around 
it keeps it o^n his head, the broad kerchief that he wears 
knotted around his throat protects his neck from the heat, 
and the leather leggings which cover the front of his legs 
protect them from the cactus in Texas, and in the North, 
where the fur and hair are left on the leather, from the 
sleet and rain as he rides against them. The gauntlets 
certainly seem too military for such rough service, but any 
one who has had a sheet rope run through his hands, can 
imagine how a lasso cuts when a wild horse is pulling on 
the other end of it. His cartridge-belt and his revolver are 
on some ranches superfluous, but cattle-men say they have 
found that on those days when they took this toy away 
from their boys, they sulked and fretted and went about 
their work half-heartedly, so that they believe it pays better 
to humor them, and to allow them to relieve the monotony 
of the day's vigil by popping at jack-rabbits and learning 
to twirl their revolver around their first finger. Of the 
many compliments I have heard paid by officers and privates 
and ranch-owners and cowboys to Mr. Frederic Remington, 
the one which was sure to follow the others was that he 
never made the mistake of putting the revolver on the left 
side. But as I went North, his anonymous admirers would 
make this same comment, but with regret that he should 
be guilty of such an error. I could not understand this at 
first until I found that the two sides of the shield lay in 
the Northern cowboy's custom of wearing his pistol on the 
left, and of the Texan's of carrying it on the right. The 
Northern man argues on this important matter that the 
sword has always been worn on the left, that it is easier to 

143 



T}ie West from a Car - Window 

reach across and sweep the pistol to either the left or right, 
and that with this motion it is at once in position. The 
Texan says this is absurd, and quotes the fact that the 
pistol-pocket has always been on the right, and that the 
lasso and reins are in the way of the left hand. It is too 
grave a question of etiquette for any one who has not at 
least six notches on his pistol-butt to decide. 

Although Mr. Kleberg's cowboys have been shorn of 
their pistols, their prowess as ropers still remains with 
them. They gave us an exhibition of this feature of their 
calling which was as remarkable a performance in its way 
as I have ever seen. The audience seated itself on the top 
of a seven -rail fence, and thrilled with excitement. At 
least a part of it did. I fancy Mr. Kleberg was slightly 
bored, but he was too polite to show it. Sixty wild horses 
were sent into a pen eighty yards across, and surrounded 
by the seven -rail fence. Into this the cowboys came, 
mounted on their ponies, and at Mr. Kleberg's word lassoed 
whichever horse he designated. They threw their ropes 
as a man tosses a quoit, drawing it back at the instant it 
closed over the horse's head, and not, as the beginner does, 
allowing the noose to settle loosely, and to tighten through 
the horse's effort to move forward. This roping was not 
so impressive as what followed, as the ropes were short, 
owing to the thick undergrowth, which j)revents long 
throws, such as are made in the North, and as the pony was 
trained to suit its gait to that of the animal it was pursuing, 
and to turn and dodge with it, and to stop with both fore- 
feet planted firmly when the rope had settled around the 
other horse's neck. 

But when they had shown us how very simple a matter 
this was, they were told to dismount and to rope the horses 



Ranch Life hi Texas 

by wliichever foot Mr. Kleberg choose to select. This was 
a real combat, and was as intensely interesting a contest 
between a thoroughly wild and terrified animal and a per- 
fectly cool man as one can see, except, perhaps, at a bull- 
fight. There is something in a contest of this sort that 
has appealed to something in all human beings who have 
blood in their veins from the days when one gladiator fol- 
lowed another with a casting-net and a trident around the 
arena down to the present, when " Peter " Poe drops on 
one knee and tries to throw Ilefl^efinger over his shoulder. 
In this the odds were in favor of the horse, as a cowboy 
on the ground is as much out of his element as a sailor on 
a horse, and looks as strangely. The boys moved and ran 
and backed away as quickly as their heavy leggings would 
permit ; but the horses moved just twice as quickly, turn- 
ing and jumping and rearing, and then racing away out of 
reach again at a gallop. But whenever they came within 
range of the ropes, they fell. The roping around the neck 
had seemed simple. The rope then was cast in a loop with 
a noose at one end as easily as one throws a trout line. 
But now the rope had to be hurled as quickly and as surely 
as a man sends a ball to first base when the batsman is 
running, except that the object at which the cowboy aims 
is moving at a gallop, and one of a galloping horse's four 
feet is a most uncertain bull's-eye. 

It is almost impossible to describe the swiftness with 
which the rope moved. It seemed to skim across the 
ground as a skipping-rope does when a child holds one end 
of it and shakes the rope up and down to make it look like 
a snake coiling and undulating over the pavement. 

One instant the rope would hang coiled from the thrower's 
right hand as he ran forward to meet the horse, moving it 

147 



The West from a Car - Window 

slowly, with a twist of his wrist, to keep it from snarling, 
and the next it would spin out along the ground, with the 
noose rolling like a hoop in the front, and would close with 
a snap over the horse's hoof, and the cowboy would throw 
himself back to take the shock, and the horse would come 
down on its side as though the ground had slipped from 
under it. 

The roping around the neck was the easy tossing of a 
quoit ; the roping around the leg was the angry snapping 
of a whip. 

There are thousands of other ranches in the United States 
besides those in Texas, and other cowboys, but the general 
characteristics are the same in all, and it is only general 
characteristics that one can attempt to give. 




VI 

ON AN INDIAN RESERVATION 



On an Indian Reservation 



VI 

ON AN INDIAN RESERVATION 




cians an( 



I HE American Indian may be considered either 
seriously or ligMly, according to one's incli- 
nation and opportunities. He may be taken 
seriously, like the Irish question, by politi- 
..nd philanthropists; or lightly, as a picturesque 
Tnd historic relic of the past, as one regards the beef-eaters, 
the Tower, or the fishwives at Scheveningen. There are 
a great many Indians and a great many reservations, and 
some are partly civilized and others are not, and the differ- 
ent tribes differ in speech and manner of life as widely as 
in the South the clay-eater of Alabama differs from a gen- 
tleman of one of the first families of Virginia. Any one 
who wishes to speak with authority on the American Indian 
must learn much more concerning him than the names of 
the tribes and the agencies. 

The Indian will only be considered here lightly and as a 
picturesque figure of the West. 

Many years ago the people of the East took their idea of 
the Indian from Cooper's novels and "Hiawatha," and pict- 
ured him shooting arrows into herds of buffalo, and sitting 
in his wigwam with many scalp-locks drying on his shield 
in the sun outside. But they know better than that now. 
Travellers from the West have told them that this picture 



The West from a Car - Window 




« 



THE CHEYENNE TYPE 



belongs to the past, and they have been taught to look 
upon the Indian as a " problem/' and to consider him as 
either a national nuisance or as a much-cheated and ill-used 
brother. They think of him, if they think of him at all, as 
one who has fallen from his high estate, and who is a dirty 
individual hanging around agencies in a high hat and a red 
shirt with a whiskey-bottle under his arm, waiting a chance 

152 



On (1)1 Indidii Reservation 

to beg or steal. Tlie Indian I saw was not at all like this, 
but was still picturesque, not only in what he wore, but in 
what he did and said, and was full of a dignity that came 
up at unexpected moments, and was as suspicious or trust- 
ful as a child. 

It is impossible when one sees a blanket Indian walk- 
ing haughtily about in his buckskin, with his face painted 
in many colors and with feathers in his hair, not to think 
that he has dressed for the occasion, or goes thus equipped 
because his forefathers did so, and not because he finds it 
comfortable. When you have seen a particular national cos- 
tume only in pictures and photographs, it is always some- 
thing of a surprise to find people wearing it with every-day 
matter-of-course ease, as though they really preferred kilts 
or sabots or moccasins to the gear to which we are accus- 
tomed at home. And the Indians in their fantastic mixture 
of colors and beads and red flannel and feathers seemed so 
theatrical at first that I could not understand why the army 
officers did not look back over their shoulders when one of 
these young braves rode by. The first Indians I saw were 
at Fort Reno, where there is an agency for the Cheyennes 
and Arapahoes. This reservation is in the Oklahoma Ter- 
ritory, but the Government has bought it from the Indians 
for a half-dollar an acre, and it is to be opened to white set- 
tlers. The country is very beautiful, and the tall grass of 
the prairie, which hides a pony, and shows only the red 
blanketed figure on his back, and over which in the clear 
places the little prairie-dogs scamper, and where the red 
buttes stand out against the sky, and show an edge -as 
sharp and curving as the prow of a man-of-war, gives one a 
view of a West one seems to have visited and known inti- 
mately through the illustrated papers. 

153 



T^ie West from a Car - Window 

I had gone to Fort Reno to see the beef issue which 
takes place there every two weeks, when the steers and the 
other things which make up the Indian's rations are dis- 
tributed by the agent. I missed the issue by four hours, 
and had to push on to Anadarko, where another beef issue 
was to come off three days hiter, which was trying, as I had 
met few men more interesting and delightful than the of- 
ficers at the post-trader's mess. But I was fortunate, in the 
short time in which I was at Fort Reno, in stumbling upon 
an Indian council. Two lieutenants and a surgeon and I 
had ridden over to the Indian agency, and although they 
allow no beer on an Indian reservation, the surgeon had 
hopes. It had been a long ride — partly through water, 
partly over a dusty trail — and it was hot. But if the agent 
had a private store for visitors, he was not in a position to 
offer it, for his room was crowded with chiefs of renown 
and high degree. They sat in a circle around his desk 
on the floor, or stood against the wall smoking solemnly. 
When they approved of what the speaker said, they grunted; 
and though that is the only word for it, they somehow 
made that form of " hear, hear," impressive. Those chiefs 
who spoke talked in a spitting, guttural fashion, fa^' down 
the throat, and without gestures ; and the son of one of 
them, a boy from Carlisle, in a gray ready-made suit and 
sombrero, translated a five-minutes' speech, which had all 
the dignity of Salvini's address to the Senators, by : " And 
Red Wolf he says he thinks it isn't right." Cloud-Shield 
rose and said the chiefs were glad to see that the officers 
from the fort were in the room, as that meant that the 
Indian would have fair treatment, and that the officers were 
always the Indians' best friends, and were respected in 
times of peace as friends, and in times of war as enemies. 



\ 



On an Indian Reservation 

After wliich, the officers, considering guiltily the real object 
of their visit, and feeling properly abashed, took off their 
hats and tried to look as though they deserved it, which, as 
a rule, they do. It may be of interest, in view of an Indian 
outbreak, to know that this council of the chiefs was to 
protest against the cutting down of the rations of the 
Cheyennes and the Arapahoes. Last year it cost the Gov- 
ernment one hundred and thirteen thousand dollars to feed 
them, and this year Commissioner Martin, with a fine spirit 
of economy, proposes to reduce this by just one-half. This 
means hunger and illness, and in some cases death. 

" He says," translated the boy interpreter, gazing at the 
ceiling, "that they would like to speak to the people at 
Washington about this thing, for it is not good." 

The agent traced figures over his desk with his pen. 

" Well, I can't do anything," he said, at last. " All I can 
do is to let the people at Washington know what they say. 
But to send a commission all the way to Washington will 
take a great deal of money, and the cost of it will have to 
come out of their allowance. Tell them that. Tell them 
I'll write on about it. That's all I can do." 

That night the chiefs came solemnly across parade, and 
said "How !" grimly to the orderly in front of the colonel's 
headquarters. 

"You see," said the officers, "they have come to com- 
plain, but the colonel cannot help them. If Martin wants 
a war, he is going just the best way in the world to get it, 
and then we shall have to go out and shoot them, poor 
devils !" 

I was very sorry to leave Fort Keno, not only on account 
of the officers there, but because the ride to Anadarko must 
be made in stages owned by a Mr. Williamson. This is nut 



The West from a Car - Windoio 

intended as an advertisement for Mr. Williamson's stages. 
He does not need it, for he is, so his drivers tell me, very 
rich indeed, and so economical that he makes them buy 
their own whips. Every one who has travelled through the 
Indian Territory over Mr. Williamson's routes wishes that 
sad things may happen to him; but no one, I believ'e, would 
be so wicked as to hope he may ever have to ride in one of 
his own stages. The stage-coach of the Indian Territory 
lacks the romance of those that Dick Turpin stopped, or of 
the Deadwood coach, or of those that Yuba Bill drives for 
Bret Harte with four horses, with gamblers on top and 
road-agents at the horses' heads. They are only low four- 
wheeled wagons with canvas sides and top, and each revo- 
lution of the wheels seems to loosen every stick and nail, 
and throws you sometimes on top of the driver, and some- 
times the driver on top of you. They hold together, 
though, and float bravely through creeks, and spin down 
the side of a canon on one wheel, and toil up the other 
side on two, and at such an angle that you see the sun 
bisected by the wagon-tongue. At night the stage seems 
to plunge a little more than in the day, and you spend it in 
trying to sleep with your legs under the back seat and your 
head on the one in front, while the driver, who wants to 
sleep and cannot, shouts profanely to his mules and very 
near to your ear on the other side of the canvas. 

Anadarko is a town of six stores, three or four frame 
houses, the Indian agent's store and office, and the City 
Hotel. Seven houses in the AVest make a city. I said I 
thought this was the worst hotel in the Indian Territory, 
but the officers at Fort Sill, who have travelled more than 
I, think it is the worst in the United States. It is possible 
that they are right. There are bluffs and bunches of timber 



-'^3 




On an Indian Reservation 

around Anadarko, but the prairie stretches towards the 
west, and on it is the pen from which the cattle are issued. 
The tepees and camp-fires sprang up overnight, and when 
we came out the next morning the prairie was crowded 
with them, and more Indians were driving in every minute, 
with the family in the wagon and the dogs under it, as the 
country people in the East flock into town for the circus. 
The men galloped off to the cattle-pen, and the women 
gathered in a long line in front of the agent's store to wait 
their turn for the rations. It was a curious line, with very 
young girls in it, very proud of the little babies in beaded 
knapsacks on their backs — dirty, bright -eyed babies that 
looked like mummies suddenly come to life again at the 
period of their first childhood — and wrinkled, bent old 
squaws, even more like mummies, with coarse white hair, 
and hands worn almost out of shape with work. Each of 
these had a tag, such as those that the express companies 
use, on which was printed the number in each family, and 
the amount of grain, flour, baking-powder, and soap to which 
the family was entitled. They passed in at one door and in 
front of a long counter, and out at another. They crowded 
and pushed a great deal, almost as much as their fairer 
sisters do in front of the box-office at a Patti matinee, and 
the babies blinked stoically at the sun, and seemed to wish 
tliey could get their arms out of the wrappings and rub 
away the tears. A man in a sombrero would look at the 
tag and call out, " One of flour, two of sugar, one soap, and 
one baking-powder," and his Indian assistants delved into 
the barrels behind the line of the counter, and emptied the 
rations into the squaw's open apron. She sorted them when 
she reached the outside. By ten o'clock tlie distribution 
was over, and the women followed the men to the cattle- 

L 161 



The West from a Car -Window 

pen on the prairie. There were not over three hundred 
Indians there, although they represented several thousand 
others, who remained in the different camps scattered over 
the reservation, wherever water and timber, and bluffs to 
shield them best from the wind, were to be found in com- 
mon. Each steer is calculated to supply twenty-five Indians 
with beef for two weeks, or from one and a half to two 
pounds of beef a day; this is on the supposition that the 
steers average from one thousand to one thousand and two 
hundred pounds. The steers that I saw issued weighed 
about five hundred pounds, and when they tried to run, 
stumbled with the weakness of starvation. They were noth- 
ing but hide and ribs and two horns. They were driven 
four at a time through a long chute, and halted at the gate 
at the end of it until their owner's names were marked off 
the list. The Indians were gathered in front of the gate in 
long rows, or in groups of ten or twelve, sitting easily in 
their saddles, and riding off leisurely in bunches of four as 
their names were called out, and as their cattle were started 
off with a parting kick into the open prairie. 

The Apaches, Comanches, Delawares, and Towacomies 
drove their share off towards their camps ; the Caddoes 
and the Kiowas, who live near the agency, and who were 
served last, killed theirs, if they chose to do so, as soon as 
they left the pen. A man in charge of the issue held a 
long paper in his hand, and called out, " Eck-hoos-cho, 
Pe-an-voon-it, Hoos-cho, and Cho-noo-chy," which meant 
that Red-Bird, Large -Looking -Glass, The Bird, and Deer- 
Head were to have the next four steers. His assistant, an 
Indian policeman, with " God helps them who help them- 
selves" engraved on his brass buttons, with the figure of 
an Indian toiling at a plough in the centre, repeated these 



On an Indian Reservation 

names aloud, and designated which steer was to go to which 
Indian. 

A beef issue is not a pretty thing to watch. Why the 
Government does not serve its meat with the throats cut, 
as any reputable butcher would do, it is not possible to 
determine. It seems to prefer, on the contrary, that the 
Indian should exhibit his disregard for the suffering of 
animals and his bad marksmanship at the same time. 
AVhen the representatives of the more distant tribes had 
ridden off, chasing their beef before them, the Caddoes 
and Kiovvas gathered close around the gate of the pen, 
with the boys in front. They were handsome, mischievous 
boys, with leather leggings, colored green and blue and with 
silver buttons down the side, and beaded buckskin shirts. 
They sat two on each pony, and each held his bow and 
arrows, and as the steers came stumbling blindly out into 
the open, they let the arrows drive from a distance of 
ten feet into the animal's flank and neck, where they stuck 
quivering. Then the Indian boys would yell, and their 
fathers, who had hunted buffaloes with arrows, smiled ap- 
provingly. The arrows were not big enough to kill, they 
merely hurt, and the steer would rush off into a clumsy 
gallop for fifty yards, when its owner would raise bis Win- 
chester, and make the dust spurt up around, it until one 
bullet would reach a leg, and the steer would stop for an 
instant, with a desperate toss of its head, and stagger for- 
ward again on three. The dogs to the number of twenty 
or more were around it by this time in a snarling, leaping 
pack, and the owner would try again, and wound it perhaps 
in the flank, and it would lurch over heavily like a drunken 
man, shaking its head from side to side and tossing its 
horns at the dogs, who bit at the place where the blood 

165 



The West from a Car - Window 

ran, and snapped at its legs. Sometimes it would lie there 
for an hour, until it bled to death, or, again, it would 
scramble to its feet, and the dogs would start off in a panic 
of fear after a more helpless victim. 

The field grew thick with these miniature butcheries, the 
Winchesters cracking, and the spurts of smoke rising and 
drifting away, the dogs yelping, and the Indians wheeling 
in quick circles around the steer, shooting as they rode, 
and hitting the mark once in every half-dozen shots. It 
was the most unsportsmanlike and wantonly cruel exhibi- 
tion I have ever seen. A bull in a ring has a fighting 
chance and takes it, but these animals, who were too weak 
to stand, and too frightened to run, staggered about until 
the Indians had finished torturing them, and then, with 
eyes rolling and blood spurting from their mouths, would 
pitch forward and die. And they had to be quick about 
it, before the squaws began cutting off the hide while the 
flanks were still heaving. 

This is the view of a beef issue which the friend of the 
Indian does not like to take. He prefers calling your at- 
tention to the condition of the cattle served the Indian, and 
in showing how outrageously he is treated in this respect. 
The Government either purchases steers for the Indians a 
few weeks before an issue, or three or four months previous 
to it, feeding them meanwhile on the Government reserva- 
tion. The latter practice is much more satisfactory to the 
contractor, as it saves him the cost and care of these cattle 
during the winter, and the inevitable loss which must ensue 
in that time through illness and starvation. Those I saw 
had been purchased in October, and had been weighed and 
branded at that time with the Government brand. They 
were then allowed to roam over the Government reservation 

16G 



On an Indian Reservation 

until the spring, when they had fallen off in weight from 
one-half to one-third. They were then issued at their orio-. 
inal weight. That is, a steer which in October was found 
to weigh eleven hundred pounds,^ and which would supply 
twenty or more people with meat, was supposed to have 
kept this weight throughout the entire winter, and was 
issued at eleven hundred although it had not three hun- 
dred pounds of flesh on its bones. The agent is not to 
blame for this. This is the fault of the Government, and 
it is quite fair to suppose that some one besides the con- 
tractor benefits by the arrangement. When the beef is 
issued two weeks after the contract has been made, it can 
and frequently is rejected by the army officer in charge of 
the issue if he thinks it is unfit. But the officers present at 
the issue that I saw were as helpless as they were indio-nant, 
for the beef had weighed the weight credited to it once 
when it was paid for, and the contractor had saved the ex- 
pense of keeping it, and the Indian received just one-fourth 
of the meat due him, and for which he had paid in land. 

Fort Sill, which is a day's journey in a stage from Ana- 
darko, is an eight-company post situated on the table-land 
of a hill, with other hills around it, and is, thouofh some- 
what inaccessible, as interesting and beautiful a spot to 
visit as many others which we cross the ocean to see. I 
will be able to tell why this is so when I write something 
later about the army posts. There are any number of 
Indians here, and they add to the post a delightfully pictu- 
resque and foreign element. L Troop of the Seventh cav- 
alry, which is an Indian troop, is the nucleus around which 
the other Indians gather. The troop is encamped at the foot 
of the hill on which the post stands. It shows the Indian 
civilized by uniform, and his Indian brother uncivilized in 

1G7 



The West from a £Jar - Window 

his blanket and war-paint ; and altliongh I should not like 
to hurt the feelings of the patient, enthusiastic officers who 
have enlisted the Indians for these different troops for 
which the Government calls, I think the blanket Indian is a 
much more warlike-looking* and interesting individual. But 
you mustn't say so, as George the Third advised. The 
soldier Indians live in regulation tents staked out in rows, 
and with the ground around so cleanly kept that one could 
play tennis on it, and immediately back of these are the 
conical tepees of their wives, brothers, and grandmothers ; 
and what Lieutenant Scott is going to do with all these 
pretty young squaws and beautiful children and withered 
old witches, and their two or three hundred wolf-dogs, when 
he marches forth to war with his Indian troop, is one of 
the questions his brother officers find much entertainment 
in asking. 

The Indian children around this encampment were the 
brightest spot in my entire Western trip. They are the 
prettiest and most beautifully barbaric little children I have 
ever seen. They grow out of it very soon, but that is no 
reason why one should not make the most of it while it 
lasts. And they are as wild and fearful of the white visi- 
tor, unless he happens to be Lieutenant Scott or Second 
Lieutenant Quay, as the antelope in the prairie around him. 
It required a corporal's guard, two lieutenants, and three 
squaws to persuade one of them to stand still and be photo" 
graphed, and whenever ray camera and I appeared together 
there was a wild stampede of Indian children, w^hich no num- 
ber of looking-glasses or dimes or strings of beads could 
allay. Not that they would not take the bribes, but they 
would run as soon as they had snatched them. It was very 
distressing, for I did not mean to hurt them very much. 




i^UlA^ HOY A>D mNlO PO.NV 



On an Indian Reservation 

The older people were kinder, and would let me sit inside 
the tepees, which were very warm on the coldest days, and 
watch them cook, and play their queet games, and work 
moccasins, and gamble at monte for brass rings if they were 
women, or for cartridges if they were men. And for ways 
that are dark and tricks that are vain, I think the Indian 
monte-dealer can instruct a Chinese poker-player in man;< 
things. What was so fine about them was their dignity, 
hospitality, and strict suppression of all curiosity. Thej) 
always received a present as though they were doing you a 
favor, and you felt that you were paying tribute. This 
makes them difficult to deal with as soldiers. They cannot 
be treated as white men, and put in the guard -house for 
every slight offence. Lieutenant Scott has to explain 
things to them, and praise them, and excite a spirit of 
emulation among them by commending those publicly who 
have done well. For instance, they hate to lose their long- 
hair, and Lieutenant Scott did not order them to have it 
cut, but told them it would please him if they did ; and sc 
one by one, and in bunches of three and four, they tramped 
up the hill to the post barber, and back again with their 
locks in their hands, to barter them for tobacco with the 
post trader. The Indians at Fort Sill were a temperate 
lot, and Lieutenant Harris, who has charge of the can- 
teen, growled because they did not drink enough to pay 
for their share of the dividend which is returned to each 
troop at the end of the month. 

Lieutenant Scott obtained his ascendency over his troop 
in several ways — first, by climbing a face of rock, and, 
with the assistance of Lieutenant Quay, taking an eagle 
from the nest it had built there. Every Indian in the reser- 
vation knew of that nest, and had long wanted the eagle's 

171 



The West from a Car - Windoio 

feathers for a war-bonnet, but none of them had ever dared 
to climb the mirrorlike surface of the cliff, with the rocks 
below. The fame of this exploit spread, by what means it 
is hard to understand among people who have no news- 
papers or letters, but at beef issues, perhaps, or Messiah 
dances, or casual meetings on the prairie, which help to 
build up reputations and make the prowess of one chief 
known to those of all the other tribes, or the beauty of an 
Indian girl familiar. Then, following this exploit, three 
little Indian children ran away from school because they 
had been flogged, and tried to reach their father's tent 
fifteen miles off on the reservation, and were found half- 
buried in the snow and frozen to death. One of them was 
without his heavier garments, which he had wrapped around 
his younger brother. The terrified school-teacher sent a 
message to the fort begging for two troops of cavalry to 
protect him from the wrath of the older Indians, and the 
post commander sent out Lieutenant Scott alone to treat 
with them. His words were much more effective than two 
troops of cavalry would have been, and the threatened out- 
break was stopped. The school-master fled to the woods, 
and never came back. What the Indians saw of Lieuten- 
ant Scott at this crisis made them trust him for the future, 
and this and the robbery of the eagle's nest explain partly, 
as do his gentleness and consideration, the remarkable hold 
he has over them. Some one was trying to tell one of the 
chiefs how the white man could bring lightning down from 
the sky, and make it talk for him from one end of the 
country to the other. 

" Oh yes," the Indian said, simply, " that is quite true. 
Lieutenant Scott says so." 

But what has chiefly contributed to make the lieuten- 

172 



On an Indian Reservation 

ant's work easy for him is his knowledge of the sii^n lan- 
guage, with which the different tribes, though speaking 
different languages, can communicate one with the other. 
He is said to speak this more correctly and fluently than 
any other officer in the army, and perhaps any other white 
man. It is a very curious language. It is not at all like 
the deaf-and-dumb alphabet, which is an alphabet, and is 
not pretty to watch. It is just what its name implies — a 
language of signs. The first time I saw the lieutenant 
speaking it, I confess I thought, having heard of his skill 
at Fort Reno, that he was only doing it because he could 
do it, as young men who speak French prefer to order their 
American dinners in that language when the waiter can 
understand English quite as well as themselves. I regarded 
it as a pleasing weakness, and was quite sure that the lieu- 
tenant was going to meet the Indian back of the canteen 
and say it over again in plain every-day words. In this I 
wronged him ; but it was not until I had watched his Irish 
sergeant converse in this silent language for two long hours 
with half a dozen Indians of different tribes, and had seen 
them all laugh heartily at his witticisms delivered in sema- 
phoric gestures, that I really believed in it. It seems that 
what the lieutenant said was, "Tell the fi.rst sergeant that I 
wish to see the soldiers drill at one o'clock, and, after that, 
go to the store and ask Madeira if there is to be a beef 
issue to-day." It is very difficult to describe in writing- 
how he did this; and as it is a really pretty thing to watch, 
it seems a pity to spoil it. As well as I remember it,- he 
did something like this. He first drew his hand over his 
sleeve to mark the sergeant's stripes ; then he held his 
fingers upright in front of him, and moved them forward 
to signify soldiers ; by holding them in still another posi- 

173 



The West from a Car -Windoiv 

tion, he represented soldiers drilling ; then he made a spy- 
glass out of his thumb and first finger, and looked up 
through it at the sky — this represented the sun at one 
o'clock. " After that " was a quick cut in the air ; . the 
" store " was an interlacing of the fingers, to signify a place 
where one thing met or was exchanged for another ; " Ma- 
deira" he named; beef was a turning up of the fingers, to rep- 
resent horns; and how he represented issue I have no idea. 
It is a most curious thing to watch, for they change from 
one sign to the other with the greatest rapidity. I always 
regarded it with great interest as a sort of game, and tried 
to guess what the different gestures might mean. Some of 
the signs are very old, and their origin is as much in dis- 
pute as some of the lines in the first folios of Shakespeare, 
and have nearly as many commentators. All the Indians 
know these signs, but very few of them can tell how they 
came to mean what they do. " To go to war," for instance, 
is shown by sweeping the right arm out with the thumb 
and first finger at right angles ; this comes from an early 
custom among the Indians of carrying a lighted pipe before 
them when going on the war-path. The thumb and finger 
in that position are supposed to represent the angle of the 
bowl of the pipe and the stem. 

I visited a few of the Indian schools when I was in the 
Territory, and found the pupils quite learned. The teachers 
are not permitted to study the Indian languages, and their 
charges in consequence hear nothing but English, and so 
pick it up the more quickly. The young women who teach 
them seem to labor under certain disadvantages ; one of 
'them was reading the English lesson from a United States 
history intended for much older children — grown-up chil- 
dren, in fact — and explained that she had to order and 

m 




.^^•' 



A KIOWA MAIDEN 



On an Indian Reservation 

select the school-books she used from a list furnished by 
the Government, and could form no opinion of its appropri- 
ateness until it arrived. 

Some of the Indian parents are very proud of their chil- 
dren's progress, and on beef-issue days visit the schools, 
and listen with great satisfaction to their children speaking 
in the unknown tongue. There were several in one of the 
school-rooms while I was there, and the teacher turned them 
out of their chairs to make room for us, remarking pleas- 
antly that the Indians were accustomed to sitting around 
on the ground. She afterwards added to this by telling us 
that there was no sentiment in her, and that she taught 
Indians for the fifty dollars there was in it. The mother of 
one of the little boys was already crouching on the floor as 
we came in, or squatting on her heels, as they seem to be 
able to do without fatigue for any length of time. During 
the half-hour we were there, she never changed her position 
or turned her head to look at us, but kept her eyes fixed 
only on her son sitting on the bench above her. He was a 
very plump, clean, and excited little Indian, with his hair 
cut short, and dressed in a very fine pair of trousers and 
jacket, and with shoes and stockings. He was very keen 
to show the white visitors how well he knew their talk, and 
read his book with a masterful shaking of the head, as 
though it had no terrors for him. His mother, kneeling at 
his side on the floor, wore a single garment, and over that a 
dirty blanket strapped around her waist with a beaded belt. 
Her feet were bare, and her coarse hair hung down over 
her face and down her back almost to her waist in an un- 
kempt mass. She supported her chin on one hand, and 
with the other hand, black and wrinkled, and with nails 
broken by cutting wood and harnessing horses and plough- 

M 17T 



The West from a Car - Window 

ing in the fields, brushed her hair back from before her 
eyes, and then touched her son's arm wistfully, as a dog 
tries to draw his master's eyes, and as though he were 
something fragile and fine. But he paid no attention to 
her whatsoever ; he was very much interested in the lesson. 
She was the only thing I saw in the school-room. I won- 
dered if she was thinking of the days when she carried 
his weight on her back as she went about her cooking or 
foraging for wood,' or swung him from a limb of a tree, 
and of the first leather leggings she made for him when he 
was able to walk, and of the necklace of elk teeth, and the 
arrows which he used to fire bravely at the prairie-dogs. 
He was a very different child now, and very far away 
from the doglike figure crouching by his side and gazing 
up patiently into his face, as if looking for something she 
had lost. 

It is quite too presumptuous to suggest any opinion on 
the Indian question when one has only lived with them for 
three weeks, but the experience of others who have lived 
with them for thirty years is worth repeating. You will 
find that the individual point of view regarding the Indian 
is much biassed by the individual interests. A man told me 
that in his eyes no one under heaven was better than a 
white man, and if the white man had to work for his living, 
he could not see why the Indian should not work for his. 
I asked him if he thought of taking up Indian land in the 
Territory when it was open in the spring, and he said that 
was his intention, " and why ?" 

The officers are the only men who have absolutely noth- 
ing to gain, make, or lose by the Indians, and their point of 
view is accordingly the fairest, and they themselves say it 
would be a mistake to follow the plan now under consid- 

ITS 



Oti an Indian Reservation 

eration — of placing officers in charge of the agencies. This 
would at t)nce strip them of their present neutral position, 
and, as well, open to them the temptation which the control 
of many thousands of dollars' worth of property entails 
where the recipients of this property are as helpless and 
ignorant as children. They rather favor raising the salary 
of the Indian agent from two thousand to ten thousand dol- 
lars, and by so doing bring men of intelligence and probity 
into the service, and destroy at the sair-^ time the temptation 
to " make something " out of the office. It may have been 
merely an accident, but I did not meet with one officer in 
any of the army posts who did not side with the Indian in 
his battle for his rights with the Government. As for the 
agents, as the people say in the West, " they are not here 
for their health." The Indian agents of the present day 
are, as every one knows, political appointments, and many 
of them — not all — are men who at home would keep their 
corner grocery or liquor store, and who would flatter and 
be civil to every woman in the neighboring tenement who 
came for a pound of sugar or a pitcher of beer. These 
men are suddenly placed in the control of hundreds of sen- 
sitive, dangerous, semi -civilized people, whom they are as 
capable of understanding as a Bowery boy would be of 
appreciating an Arab of the desert. 

The agents are not the only people who make mistakes. 
Some friend mailed me a book the other day on Indian 
reservations, in order that I might avoid writing what has 
already been written. I read only one page of the book, 
in which the author described his manner of visiting the 
Indian encampments. He would drive to one of these in 
his ambulance, and upon being informed that the chiefs 
were waiting to receive him in their tents, would bid them 

179 



The West from a Car - Window 

meet him at the next camp, to which he would drive rapid- 
ly, and there make the same proposition. He would then 
stop his wagon three miles away on the prairie, and wait 
for the chiefs to follow him to that point. What his ob- 
ject was in this exhibition, with which he seemed very well 
satisfied, he only knows. Whether it was to teach the 
chiefs they were not masters in their own camps, or that he 
was a most superior person, I could not make out ; but he 
might just as eilectively have visited Washington, and sent 
the President word he could not visit him at the Wliite 
House, but that he would grant him an interview at his 
hotel. I wonder just how near this superior young man 
got to the Indians, and just how wide they opened their 
hearts to him. 

There was an Indian agent once — it was not long ago, 
but there is no need to give dates or names, for the man is 
dead — who when the Indians asked him to paint the wag-^ 
ons (with which the Government furnished them through 
him in return for their land) red instead of green, answered 
that he would not pander to their absurdly barbaric tastes. 
Only he did not say absurdly. He was a man who had his 
own ideas about things, and who was not to be fooled, and 
he was also a superior person, who preferred to trample on 
rather than to understand the peculiarities of his wards. 
So one morning this agent and his wife and children were 
found hacked to pieces by these wards with barbaric tastes, 
and the soldiers were called out, and shot many of the 
Indians ; and many white women back of the barracks, 
and on the line itself, are now wearing mourning, and 
several officers got their first bar. It would seem from 
this very recent incident, as well as from many others 
of which one hears, that it would be cheaper in the end 



On an Indian Reservation 

to place agents over the Indians with sufficient intelli- 
gence to know just when to be firm, and when to com- 
promise in a matter ; for instance, that of painting a wag- 
on red. 



VII 
A CIMLIAX AT AX ARMY POST 



A Civilian at an Army Post 



VII 

A CIVILIAN AT AN ARMY POST 

lg^^fg^(^HE army posts of tlie United States are as dif- 
|M^^ erent one from another as the stations along 
W^ ^V^ tlie line of a great railroad system. There is 
^^^i) the same organization for all, and the highest 
officers govern one as well as the other; but in appearance 
and degree of usefulness and local rule they are as inde- 
pendent and yet as dependent, and as far apart in actual 
miles, as the Grand Central Depot in New York, with 
its twenty tracks and as many ticket- windows and oak- 
bound offices and greatest after-dinner orator, is distant 
from the section -house at the unfinished end of a road 
somewhere on the prairie. The commanding officer's quar- 
ters alone at Fort Sheridan cost thirty thousand dollars, 
and more than a million and a half has been spent on Fort 
Riley ; but there are many other posts where nature sup- 
plied the mud and logs for the whole station, and the cost 
to the Government could not have been more than three 
hundred dollars at the most. It is consequently difficult 
to write in a general way of army posts. What is true of 
one is by no means true of another, and it will be better, 
perhaps, to first tell of those army posts which possess 
many features in common -eight -company posts, for in- 
stance, which are not too large nor too small, not too 

185 



The West from a Car - Window 

near civilization, and yet not too far removed from the rail- 
road. An eight -company post is a little town or com- 
munity of about three hundred people living in a quad- 
rangle around a parade-ground. The scenery surrounding 
the quadrangle may differ as widely as you please to im- 
agine it; it may be mountainous and beautiful, or level, 
flat, and unprofitable, but the parade-ground is always the 
same. It has a flag-pole at the entrance to the quadrangle, 
and a base-ball diamond marked out on the side on which 
the men live, and tennis-courts towards the officers' quar- 
ters. When you speak of the side of the square where the 
enlisted men live, you say " barracks," and you refer to the 
officers' share of the quadrangle as "the line." In England 
you can safely say that an officer is living in barracks, but 
you must not say this of a United States officer ; he lives 
in the third or fourth house up or down " the line." 

The barracks are a long continuous row of single-story 
buildings with covered porches facing the parade. They 
are generally painted an uncompromising brown, and are 
much more beautiful inside than out, especially the mess- 
rooms, where all the wood-work has been scrubbed so hard 
that the tables are worn almost to a concave surface. The 
architectural appearance of the officers' quarters on the line 
differs in different posts ; but each house of each individual 
post, whether it is a double or single house, is alike to the 
number of bricks in the walls and in the exact arrangement 
of the rooms. The wives of the officers may change the 
outer appearance of their homes by planting rose-bushes 
and ivy about the yards, but whenever they do, some other 
officer's wife is immediately transferred from another post 
and " outranks" them, and they have to move farther down 
the line, and watch the new-comer plucking their roses, and 

1S6 



A Civilian at an Army Post 

reaping the harvest she has not sown. This rule also ap- 
plies to new wall-paper, and the introduction at your own 
expense of open fireplaces, with blue and white tiles 
Avhich will not come off or out when the new-comer moves 
in. In addition to the officers' quarters and the barracks, 
there is an administration building, which is the executive 
mansion of this little community, a quartermaster's store- 
house, a guard-house, and the hospital. The stables are 
back of the barracks, out of sight of those who live facing 
the parade, and there is generally a rear-guard of little huts 
and houses occupied by sergeants' wives, who do the w^ash- 
ing for the posts, and do it very well. This is, briefly, the 
actual appearance of an army post — a quadrangle of houses, 
continuous and one-story high on two sides, and separate 
and two stories high on the other two sides, facing the 
parade, and occasionally surrounded by beautiful country. 

The life of an army post, its internal arrangements, its 
necessary routine, and its expedients for breaking this rou- 
tine pleasantly, cannot be dealt with so briefly ; it is a deli- 
cate and extensive subject. It is impossible to separate the 
official and social life of an array post. The commanding 
officer does not lose that dignity which doth hedge him in 
when he and his orderly move from the administration 
building to his quarters, and it would obviously confuse 
matters if a second lieutenant bet him in the morning he 
could not put the red ball into the right-corner pocket, and 
in the evening at dress parade he should order the same 
lieutenant and his company into the lower right-hand 
corner of the parade at double-quick. This would tend to 
destroy discipline. And so, as far as the men of the post 
are concerned, the official and social life touch at many 
points. With the women, of course, it is different, although 

1S9 



The West from a Car - Window 

there was a colonel's wife not long ago who said to the 
officers' wives assisting her to receive at a dance, " You will 
take your places, ladies, in order of rank." T repeat this 
mild piece of gossip because it was the only piece of gossip 
1 heard at any army post, which is interesting when one 
remembers the reputation given the army posts by one of 
their own people for that sort of thing. 

The official head of the post is the commanding officer, 
lie has under him eight " companies," if they are infantry, 
or " troops " if they are cavalry, each commanded in turn 
by a captain, who has under him a first and second lieuten- 
ant, who rule in their turn numerous sergeants and cor- 
porals. There is also a major or two, two or three surgeons, 
who rank with the captains, and a quartermaster and an 
adjutant, who are selected from among the captains or 
lieutenants of the post, and who perform, in consequence, 
double duty. The majority of the officers are married ; this 
is not a departmental regulation nor a general order, but it 
happens to be so. I visited one very large post in which 
every one was married except one girl, and a second lieuten- 
ant, who spoiled the natural sequel by being engaged to a 
girl somewhere else. And at the post I had visited before 
this there were ten unmarried and unengaged lieutenants, 
and no young women. It seems to me that this presents an 
unbalanced condition of affairs, which should be considered 
and adjusted by Congress even before the question of lineal 
promotion. 

It is true that the commanding officer is supposed to be 
the most important personage in an army post, but that is 
not so. He, as well as every one else in it, is ruled by a 
young person with a brass trumpet, who apparently never 
sleeps, eats, or rests, and who spends his days tooting on his 

190 




i-r-\ 



THE OMNIPOTKXT BUGLER 



A Civilian at an Army Post 

bugle in the middle of the parade in rainy and in sunny 
weather and through good and evil report. He sounds in all 
thirty-seven "calls" a day, and the garrison gets up and lies 
down, and eats, and waters the horses, and goes to church 
and school, and to horse exercise, and mounts guard, and 
drills recruits, and parades in full dress whenever he thinks 
they should. His prettiest call is reveille, which is sounded 
at half-past six in the morning. It is bright and spirited, 
and breathes promise and hope for the new day, and I per- 
sonally liked it best because it meant that while I still had 
an hour to sleep, three hundred other men had to get up and 
clean cold guns and things in the semi-darkness. Next to 
the bugler in importance is the quartermaster. He is a cap- 
tain or a first lieutenant with rare executive ability, and it is 
he who supplies the garrison with those things which make 
life bearable or luxurious, and it is he who is responsible to 
the Government for every coat of whitewash on the stables, 
and for the new stove-lid furnished the cook of N Troop, 
Thirteenth Cavalry. He is the hardest-worked man in the 
post, although that would possibly be denied by every other 
officer in it ; and he is supposed to be an authority on archi- 
tecture, sanitary plumbing, veterinary surgery, household 
furnishing from the kitchen range to the electric button on 
the front door, and to know all things concerning martial 
equipments from a sling-belt to an ambulance. 

He is a wonderful man, and possessed of a vast and in- 
tricate knowledge, but his position in the post is very much 
like that of a base-ball umpire's on the field, for he is never 
thanked if he does well, and is abused by every one on 
principle. And he is never free. At the very minute he is 
lifting the green mint to his lips, his host will say, "^By- 
the-way, my striker tells me that last piece of stove-pipe 

N 193 



The West from a Car - Window 

you furnished us does not fit by two inches ; I don't believe 
you looked at the dimensions;" and when he hastens to 
join the ladies for protection, he is saluted with an anxious 
chorus of inquiries as to when he is going to put that pane 
of glass in the second-story window, and where are those 
bricks for the new chimney. His worst enemies, however, 
lie far afield, for he wages constant war with those clerks 
at the Treasury Department at Washington who go over his 
accounts and papers, and who take keen and justifiable 
pride in making him answer for every fraction of a cent 
which he has left unexplained. The Government, for in- 
stance, furnishes his storehouse with a thousand boxes of 
baking-powder, valued at seventy dollars, or seven cents a 
box. If he sells three boxes for twenty-five cents — I am 
quoting an actual instance — the Treasury Department re- 
turns his papers, requesting him to explain who got the 
four cents, and is anxious to know what he means by it. 

I once saw some tin roofs at a post ; they had been 
broken in coming, and the quartermaster condemned them. 
That was a year ago, and his papers complaining about 
these tin roofs have been travelling back and forth between 
contractor and express agent and the department at Wash- 
ington and the quartermaster ever since, and they now make 
up a bundle of seventy different papers. Sometimes the 
quartermaster defeats the Treasury Department; sometimes 
it requires him to pay money out of his own pocket. Three 
revolvers were stolen out of their rack once, and the post 
quartermaster was held responsible for their loss. He ob- 
jected to paying the sum the Government required, and 
pointed out that the revolvers should have been properly 
locked in the rack. The Government replied that the lock 
furnished by it was perfect, and not to be tampered with or 

194 



i 



A Civilian at an Army Post 

scoffed at, and that his excuse was puerile. This quarter- 
master had a mechanic in his company, and he sent for the 
young man, and told him to go through the barracks and 
open all the locks he could. At the end of an hour every 
rack and soldier's box in the post were burglarized, and tlie 
Government paid for the revolvers. 

The post quartermaster's only pleasure lies in his store- 
house, and in the neatness and order in which he keeps his 
supplies. He dearly loves to lead the civilian visitor through 
these long rows of shelves, and say, while clutching at his 
elbow to prevent his escape, "You see, there are all the 
shovels in that corner ; then over there I have the Sibley 
tents, and there on that shelf are the blouses, and next to 
them are the overcoats, and there are the canvas shoes, and 
on that shelf we keep matches, and down here, you see, are 
the boots. Everything is in its proper place." At which 
you are to look interested, and say, "Ah, yes!" just as 
though you had expected to see the baking-powder mixed 
with the pith helmets, and the axe-handles and smoking- 
tobacco grouped together on the floor. 

After the quartermaster, the adjutant, to the mind of the 
civilian at least, is the most superior being in the post. He is 
a lieutenant selected by the colonel to act as his conscience- 
keeper and letter-writer, and to convey his commands to the 
other officers. It is his proud privilege to sit in the colonel's 
own room and sign papers, and to dictate others to his as- 
sistant non-coms, and it is one of his duties to oversee the 
guard-mount, and to pick out the smartest-looking soldier 
to act as the colonel's orderly for the day. You must un- 
derstand that as the colonel's orderly does not have to 
remain on guard at night, the men detailed for guard duty 
vie with each other in presenting an appearance sufficiently 

19T 



The West from a Car - Window 

brilliant to attract the adjutant's eye, and as they all look 
exactly alike, the adjutant has to be careful. He sometimes 
spends five long minutes and much mental effort in going 
from one end of the ranks to the other to see if Xumber 
Three's boots are better blacked than Number Two's, and 
in trying to decide whether the fact that Murphy's gun- 
barrel is oilier than Cronin's should weigh against the fact 
that Cronin's gloves are new, while Murphy's are only fresh 
from the wash, both having tied on the condition of their 
cartridges, which have been rubbed to look like silver, and 
w^hich must be an entirely superflous nicety to the Indian 
who may eventually be shot with them. This is one of the 
severest duties of an adjutant's routine, and after having 
accompanied one of them through one of these prize exhibi- 
tions, I was relieved to hear him confess his defeat by tell- 
ing the sergeant that Cronin and Murphy could toss for it. 
Another perquisite of the adjutant's is his right to tell his 
brother officers at mess in a casual way that they must act 
as officer of the day or officer of the guard, or relieve Lieu- 
tenant Quay while he goes quail-hunting, or take charge of 
Captain Blank's troop of raw recruits until the captain re- 
turns to their relief. To be able to do this to men who 
outrank you, and who are much older than yourself, and 
just as though the orders came from you direct, must be a 
great pleasure, especially as the others are not allowed the 
satisfaction of asking, " Who says I must ?" or, " What's 
the matter with your doing it yourself ?" These are the 
officials of the post ; the unofficials, the wives and the 
children, make the social life whatever it is. 

There are many in the East who think life at an army 
post is one of discomfort and more or less monotony, re- 
lieved by petty gossip and flirtations. Of course one cannot 

198 



(\ :'■ 




UNITED STATES CAVALRYMAN IN FULL DRESS 



A Civilian at an Army Post 

tell in a short visit whether or not the life might become 
monotonous, though one rather suspects it would, but the 
discomforts are quite balanced by other things which 
we cannot get in the city. Of jealousy and gossip I saw 
little. I was told by one officer's wife that to the rail- 
roads was due the credit of the destruction of flirtations 
at garrisons ; and though I had heard of many great ad- 
vances and changes of conditions and territories brought 
about by the coming of the railroads, this was the first 
time I had ever heard they had interfered with the course 
of more or less true love. She explained it by saying that 
in the days when army posts lay afar from the track of 
civilization the people were more dependent upon one an- 
other, and that then there may have existed Mrs. Ilauksbees 
and Mrs. Knowles, but that to-day the railroads brought in 
fresh air and ideas from all over the country, and that the 
officers were constantly being exchanged, and others coming 
and going on detached service, and that visitors from the 
bigger outside world were appearing at all times. 

The life impresses a stranger as such a peaceful sort of an 
existence that he thinks that must be its chief and great 
attraction, and that which makes the army people, as they 
call themselves, so well content. It sounds rather absurd 
to speak of an army post of all places in the world as peace- 
ful ; but the times are peaceful now, and there is not much 
work for the officers to do, and they enjoy that blessing 
which is only to be found in the array and in the Church 
of Rome — of having one's life laid out for one by others, 
and in doing what one is told, and in not having to decide 
things for one's self. You are sure of your home, of your 
income, and you know exactly what is going to be your 
work a month or five years later. You are not dependent 

201 



The West from a Car - Window 

on the rise of a certain stock, nor the slave of patients or 
clients, and you have more or less responsibility according 
to your rank, and resj:)onsibility is a thing every man loves. 
If he has that, and his home and children, a number of 
congenial people around him, and good hunting and fishing, 
it would seem easy for him to be content. It is different 
with his wife. She may unconsciously make life very 
pleasant for her husband or very uncomfortable, in ways 
that other women may not. If she leaves him and visits 
the East to see the new gowns, or the new operas, or her 
own people, she is criticised as not possessing a truly wife- 
ly spirit, and her husband is secretly pitied ; and he knows 
it, and resents it for his wife's sake. While, on the other 
hand, if she remains always at the post, he is called a selfish 
fellow, and his wife's people at home in the East think ill 
of him for keeping her all to himself in that wilderness. 

The most surprising thing about the frontier army posts, 
to my mind, was the amount of comfort and the number 
of pretty trifies one found in the houses, especially when 
one considered the distance these trifies — such as billiard- 
tables for the club or canteen,'and standing-lamps for the 
houses on the line — had come. At several dinners, at 
posts I had only reached after two days' journey by stage, 
the tables were set exactly as they would have been in New 
York City with Sherry's men in the kitchen. There were 
red candle-shades, and salted almonds and ferns in silver 
centre-pieces, and moie forks than one ever knows what to 
do with, and all the rest of it. I hope the army people 
will not resent this, and proudly ask, " What did he expect 
to find ?" but I am sure that is not the idea of a frontier 
post we hav(^ received in the East. There was also some- 
thing delightfully novel in the table-talk, and in hearing 

202 






li 















mI \J^'^^'')0- ' I 



-'0- 

)};i' 






A Civilian at an Army Post 

one pretty, slight woman, in a smart decollete gown, casually 
tell how her husband and his men had burned the prairie 
grass around her children and herself, and turned aside a 
prairie fire that towered and roared around them, and an- 
other of how her first child had been seized with convul- 
sions in a stage-coach when they were snow-bound eighty 
miles from the post and fifty miles from the nearest city, 
and how she borrowed a clasp-knife from one of the pas- 
sengers with which he had been cutting tobacco, and lanced 
the baby's gums, and so saved his life. There was another 
hostess who startled us by saying, cheerfully, that the 
month of June at her last post was the most unpleasant in 
the year, because it was so warm that it sometimes spoiled 
the ice for skating, and that the snow in April reached 
to the sloping eaves of the house ; also the daughter of 
an Indian fighter, while pouring out at a tea one day, 
told calmly of an Indian who had sprung at her with a 
knife, and seized her horse's head, and whom she had 
shaken off by lashing the pony on to his hind legs. She 
could talk the Sioux language fluently, and had lived for 
the greater part of her life eight hundred miles from a rail- 
road. Is it any wonder you find all the men in an army 
post married when there are women who can adapt them- 
selves as gracefully to snow-shoes at Fort Brady as to the 
serious task of giving dinners at Fort Houston ? 

Fort Sam Houston at San Antonio is one of the three 
largest posts in the country, and is in consequence one of 
the heavens towards which the eyes of the army people 
turn. It is only twenty minutes from the city, and the 
weather is mild throughout the year, and in the summer 
there are palm-trees around the houses; and white uni- 
forms—which are unknown to the posts farther north, and 

205 



The West from a Car - Window 

which are as pretty as they are hard to keep clean — make 
the parade-ground look like a cricket -field. They have 
dances at this post twice a month, the regimental band fur- 
nishing the music, and the people from town helping out 
the sets, and the officers in uniforms with red, white, and 
yellow stripes. A military ball is always very pretty, and 
the dancing-hall at Houston is decorated on such occasions 
with guidons and flags, and palms and broad-leaved plants, 
which grow luxuriously everywhere, and cost nothing. I 
went directly from this much-desired post to the little one 
at Oklahoma City, which is a one-company post, and where 
there are no semi-monthly dances or serenades by the band; 
but where, on the other hand, the officers do not stumble 
over an enlisted man at every step who has to be saluted, 
and who stands still before them, as though he meant to 
" hold them up " or ask his way, until he is recognized. 
The post at Oklahoma City is not so badly off, even though 
it is built of logs and mud, for the town is near by, and the 
men get leave to visit it when they wish. But it serves to 
give one an idea of the many other one - company posts 
scattered in lonely distances along the borders of the fron- 
tier, where there are no towns, and where every man knows 
what the next man is going to say before he speaks — sin- 
gle companies which the Government .has dropped out 
there, and which it has apparently forgotten, as a man 
forgets the book he has tucked away in his shelf to read 
on some rainy day. They will probably find they are re- 
membered when the rainy days come. Fort Sill, in the 
Oklahoma Territory, is one of the eight-company posts. I 
visited several of these, and liked them better than those 
nearer the cities ; but then I was not stationed there. The 
people at these smaller isolated posts seem to live more 



A Civilian at an Army Post 

contentedly together. There is not enough of them to 
separate into cliques or sets, as they did at the larger sta- 
tions, and they were more dependent one upon another. 
There was a night when one officer on the line gave a sup- 
per, and another (one of his guests) said he wished to con- 
tribute the cigars. There had not been an imported cigar 
in that post for a year at least, and when Captain Ellis brought 
in a fresh box with two paper stamps about it, and the little 
steamer engraved on the gray band met our eyes, and we 
knew they had paid the customs duty, there was a most 
unseemly cheer and undignified haste to have the box 
opened. And then each man laid his cigar beside his 
plate, and gazed and sniffed at it, and said " Ah !" and 
beamed on every one else, and put off lighting it as 
long as he possibly could. That was a memorable 
night, and I shall never sufficiently thank Captain Ellis 
for that cigar, and for showing me how little we of 
the East appreciate the little things we have always with 
us, and which become so important when they are taken 
away. 

Fort Sill is really a summer resort ; at least, that is what 
the officers say. I was not there in summer, but it made a 
most delightful winter resort. There is really no reason at 
all why people should not go to these interior army posts, 
as well as to the one at Point Comfort, and spend the sum- 
mer or winter there, either for their health or for their 
pleasure. They can reach Fort Sill, for instance, in a three- 
days' journey from New York, and then there are two days 
of staging, and you are in a beautiful valley, with rivers 
running over rocky beds, with the most picturesque Ind- 
ians all about you, and with red and white flajj^s wioryvao-irinoj 
from the parade to the green mountain - tops, and good- 

O 209 



The West from a Car - Window 




THE BARRACKS, FORT HOUSTON 



looking boy-officers to explain the new regulations, and the 
best of hunting and fishing. 

I do not know how the people of Fort Sill will like hav- 
ing their home advertised in this way, but it seems a pity 
others should not enjoy following Colonel Jones over the 
prairie after jack-rabbits. We started four of them in one 
liour, and that is a very good sport when you have a field 
of twenty men and women and a pack of good hounds. 
The dogs of Colonel Jones were not as fast as the rabbits, 
but they were faster than the horses, and so neither dogs 
nor rabbits were hurt ; and that is as it should be, for, as 
Colonel Jones says, if you caught the rabbits, there would 
be no more rabbits to catch. Of the serious side of the 

210 



A Civilian at an Army Post 

life of an army post, of the men and of the families of the 
men who are away on dangerous field service, I have said 
nothing, because there was none of it when I was there, 
nor of the privations of those posts up in the far North- 
west, where snow and ice are almost a yearly accompani- 
ment, and where the mail and the papers, which are such a 
mockery as an exchange for the voices of real people, come 
only twice a month. 

It would be an incomplete story of life at a post which 
said nothing of the visits of homesickness, which, many 
strong men in the West have confessed to me, is the worst 
sickness with which man is cursed. And it is an illness 
which comes at irregular periods to those of the men who 
know and who love the East. It is not a homesickness for 
one home or for one person, but a case of that madness 
which seized Private Ortheris, only in a less malignant form, 
and in the officers' quarters. An impotent protest against 
the immutability of time and of space is one of its symp- 
toms — a sick disgust of the blank prairie, blackened by 
fire as though it had been drenched with ink, the bare 
parade-ground, the same faces, the same stories, the same 
routine and detailed life, which promises no change or end ; 
and with these a longing for streets and rows of houses that 
seemed commonplace before, of architecture which they had 
dared to criticise, and which now seems fairer than the 
lines of the Parthenon, a craving to get back to a place 
where people, whether one knows them or not, are hurry- 
ing home from work under the electric lights, to the rush 
of the passing hansoms and the cries of the " last editions," 
and the glare of the shop windows, to the life of a great 
city that is as careless of the exile's love for it as is the 
ocean to one who exclaims upon its grandeur from the 

211 



The West from a Car - Window 



shore 



of heart which mate 



a soreness ot neart wnicn maKes men while it lasts 
put familiar photographs out of sight, which makes the 
young lieutenants, when the band plays a certain waltz on 
the parade at sundown, bite their chin -straps, and stare 
ahead more fixedly than the regulations require. Some 
officers will confess this to you, and some will not. It is a 
question which is the happier, he who has no other scenes 
for which to care, and who is content, or he who eats his 
heart out for a while, and goes back on leave at last. 



yiii 

THE HEART OF THE GREAT DIVIDE 



1 

I 



The Heart of the Great Divide 




VIII 

THE HEART OF THE GREAT DIVIDE 

►HE City of Denver probably does more to keep 
the Eastern man who is mining or ranching 
from returning once a year to his own people, 
and from spending his earnings at home, 
than any other city in the West. It lays its charm upon 
him, and stops him half - way, and he decides that the 
journey home is rather long, and puts it off until the next 
year, and again until the next, until at last he buys a lot and 
builds a house, and only returns to the East on his wedding 
journey. Denver appeals to him more than do any of these 
other cities, for the reason that the many other Eastern 
men who have settled there are turning it into a thoroughly 
Eastern city — a smaller New York in an encircling range 
of white-capped mountains. If you look up at its towering 
office buildings, you can easily imagine yourself, were it 
not for the breadth of the thoroughfare, in down-town 
New York; and though the glimpse of the mountains at the 
end of the street in place of the spars and mast-heads of 
the East and North rivers undeceives you, the mud at your 
feet serves to help out the delusion. Denver is a really 
beautiful city, but — and this, I am sure, few people in New 
York will believe — it has the worst streets in the country. 
Their mud or their dust, as the season wills it, is the 

815 



^BHHIP The West from a Car - Wiitdow ^H 

one blot on the city's fair extent ; it is as if the City Fathers 
had served a well-appointed dinner on a soiled table-cloth. 
But they say they will arrange all that in time. 

The two most striking things about the city to me were 
the public schools and the private houses. Great corpora- 
tions, insurance companies, and capitalists erect twelve-story 
buildings everywhere. They do it for an advertisement for 
themselves or their business, and for the rent of the offices. 
But these buildings do not in any way represent a city's 
growth. You will find one or two of such buildings in 
almost every Western city, but you will find the people 
who rent the offices in them living in the hotels or in 
wooden houses on the outskirts. In Denver there are not 
only the big buildings, but mile after mile of separate 
houses, and of the prettiest, strictest, and most proper 
architecture. It is a distinct pleasure to look at these 
houses, and quite impossible to decide upon the one in 
which you would rather live. They are not merged to- 
gether in solid rows, but stand apart, with a little green 
breathing-space between, each in its turn asserting its own 
individuality. The greater part of these are built of the 
peculiarly handsom.e red stone which is found so plentifully 
in the Silver State. It is not the red stone which makes 
them so pleasantly conspicuous, but the taste of the owner 
or the architect which has turned it to account. As for the 
public schools, they are more like art museums outside than 
school-houses ; and if as much money and thought in pro- 
portion are given to the instruction as have been put upon 
the buildings, the children of Denver threaten to grow up 
into a most disagreeably superior class of young persons. 
Denver possesses those other things which make a city liv- 
able, but the public schools and the private houses were to 



The Heart of the Great Divide 

me the most distinctive features. The Denver Chib is 
quite as handsome and well ordered a club as one would 
find in New York City, and the University Club, which is 
for the younger men, brings the wanderers from different 
colleges very near and pleasantly together. Its members can 
sing more different college songs in a given space of time 
than any other body of men I have met. The theatres and 
the hotels are new and very good, and it is a delight to 
find servants so sufficiently civilized that the more they are 
ordered about and the more one gives them to do, the more 
readily they do it, knowing that this means that they are 
to be tipped. In the other Western cities, where this per- 
nicious and most valuable institution is apparently un- 
known, a traveller has to do everything for himself. 

You will find that the people of a city always pride 
themselves on something which the visitor within their 
gates would fail to notice. They have become familiar with 
those features which first appeal to him, have outgrown 
them, and have passed on to admire something else. The 
citizen of Denver takes a modest pride in the public schools 
the private houses, and the great mountains, which seem but 
an hour's walk distant and are twenty miles away; but he 
is proudest before all of two things — of his celery and his 
cable-cars. His celery is certainly the most delicious and 
succulent that grows, and his cable-cars are very beautiful 
white and gold affairs, and move with the delightfully 
terrifying speed of a toboggan. Riding on these cable-cars 
is one of the institutions of the city, just as in the summer 
a certain class of young people in New York find their 
pleasure in driving up and down the Avenue on the top of 
the omnibuses. But that is a dreary and sentimental 
journey compared with a ride on the grip-seat of a cable- 

219 



The West from a Car - Windoiv 



car, and every one in Denver patronizes this means of lo- 
comotion whether on business or on pleasure bent, and 
whether he has carriages of his own or not. There is not, 
owing to the altitude, much air to spare in Denver at any 
time, but when one mounts a cable-car, and is swept with a 
wild rush around a curve, or dropped down a grade as ab- 
ruptly as one is dropped down the elevator shaft in the 
Potter Building, what little air there is disappears, and 
leaves one gasping. Still, it is a most popular diversion, 
and even in the winter some of the younger people go 
cable-riding as we go sleighing, and take lap-robes with 
them to keep them warm. There is even a " scenic route," 
which these cars follow, and it is most delightful. 

Denver and Colorado Springs pretend to be jealous of 
one another ; why, it is impossible to understand. One is 
a city, and the other a summer or health resort ; and we 
might as properly compare Boston and Newport, or New 
York and Tuxedo. In both cities the Eastern man and 
woman and the English cousin are much more in evidence 
than the born Western man. These people are very fond 
of their homes at Denver and at the Springs, but they cer- 
tainly manage to keep Fifth Avenue and the Sound and 
the Back Bay prominently in mind. Half of those women 
whose husbands are wealthy — and every one out here seems 
to be in that condition — do the greater part of their pur- 
chasing along Broadway below Twenty-third Street, their 
letter-paper is stamped on Union Square, and their hus- 
bands are either part or whole owners of a yacht. It 
sounds very strange to hear them, in a city shut in by 
ranges of mountain peaks, speak familiarly of Larchmont 
and Hell Gate and New London and " last year's cruise." 
Colorado Springs is the great pleasure resort for the whole 

220 



The Heart of the Great Divide 

State, and the salvation and sometimes the resting-place of 
a great many invalids from all over the world. It lies at 
the base of Pike's Peak and Cheyenne Mountain, and is 
only an hour's drive from the great masses of jagged red 
rock known as the Garden of the Gods. Pike's Peak, the 
Garden of the Gods, and the Mount of the Holy Cross are 
the proudest landmarks in the State. This last mountain 
was regarded for many years almost as a myth, for while 
many had seen the formation which gives it its name, no 
one could place the mountain itself, the semblance of the 
cross disappearing as one drew near to it. But in 1876 Mr. 
Hayden, of the Government Survey, and Mr. W. II Jack- 
son, of Denver, found it, climbed it, and photographed it, 
and since then artists and others have made it familiar. 
But it will never become so familiar as to lose auo^ht of its 
wonderfully impressive grandeur. 

There are also near Colorado Springs those mineral wa- 
ters which give it its name, and of which the people are so 
proud that they have turned Colorado Springs into a pro- 
hibition town, and have made drinking the waters, as it 
were, compulsory. This is an interesting example of peo- 
ple who support home industries. There is a casino at the 
Springs, where the Hungarian band plays in summer, a 
polo field, a manufactured lake for boating, and hundreds 
of beautiful homes, fashioned after the old English country- 
house, even to the gate-keeper's lodge and the sun dial on 
the lawn. And there are canons that inspire one not to 
attempt to write about them. There are also many English 
people who have settled there, and who vie with the Eastern 
visitors in the smartness of their traps and the appearance 
of their horses. Indeed, both of these cities have so taken 
on the complexion of the East that one wonders whether it 

221 



The West from a Car - Window 

is true that the mining towns of Creede and Leadville lie 
only twelve hours away, and that one is thousands of miles 
distant from the City of New York. 

It is possible that some one may have followed this series 
of articles, of which this is the last, from the first, and that 
he may have decided, on reading them, that the West is 
filled with those particular people and institutions of which 
these articles have treated, and that one steps from ranches 
to army posts, and from Indian reservations to mining 
camps with easy and uninterrupted interest. This would 
be, perhaps it is needless to say, an entirely erroneous 
idea. I only touched on those things which could not be 
found in the East, and said nothing of the isolation of these 
particular and characteristic points of interest, of the com- 
monplace and weary distances which lay between them, and 
of the difficulty of getting from one point to another. For 
days together, while travelling to reach something of pos- 
sible interest, I might just as profitably, as far as any ma- 
terial presented itself, have been riding through New Jersey 
Pennsylvania, or Ohio. Indians do not necessarily join 
hands with the cowboys, nor army posts nestle at the feet 
of mountains filled with silver. The West is picturesque 
in spots, and, as the dramatic critics say, the interest is not 
sustained throughout. I confess I had an idea that after 
I had travelled four days in a straight line due west, every 
minute of my time would be of value, and that if each 
man I met was not a character he would tell stories of 
others who were, and that it would merely be necessary 
for me to keep my eyes open to have picturesque and 
dramatic people and scenes pass obligingly before them. 
I was soon undeceived in this, and learned that in order to 
reach the West we read about, it would be necessary for 

282 



The Heart of the Great Divide 

me to leave the railroad, and that I must pay for an hour 
of interest with days of the most unprofitable travel. Mat- 
thew Arnold said, when he returned to England, that he 
had found this country " uninteresting," and every Ameri- 
can was properly indignant, and said he could have forgiven 
him any adjective but that. If Matthew Arnold travelled 
from Pittsburg to St. Louis, from St. Louis to Corpus Christi, 
and from Corpus Christi back through Texas to the Indian 
Territory, he not only has my sympathy, but I admire him 
as a descriptive writer. For those who find the level farm 
lands of Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, and the ranches 
of upper Texas, and the cactus of Southern Texas, and the 
rolling prairie of the Indian Territory interesting, should 
travel from Liverpool to London on either line they please 
to select, and they will understand the Englishman's dis- 
content. Hundreds of miles of level mud and snow fol- 
lowed by a hot and sandy soil and uncultivated farm lands 
are not as interesting as hedges of hawthorn or glimpses 
of the Thames or ivy-covered country-houses in parks of 
oak. The soldiers who guard this land, the Indians who 
are being crowded out of it, and the cowboys who gallop 
over it and around their army of cattle, are interesting, but 
they do not stand at the railroad stations to be photo- 
graphed and to exhibit their peculiar characteristics. 

But after one leaves these different States and rides be- 
tween the mountain ranges of Colorado, he commits a sin 
if he does not sit day and night by the car window. It is 
best to say this as it shows the other side of the shield. 

You may, while travelling in the West, enjoy the pictu- 
resque excitement of being held up by train robbers, but 
you are in much more constant danger of being held up by 
commercial travellers and native Western men, who de- 



The West from a Car -Windoio 

maud that you stand and deliver yoar name, your past his- 
tory, your business, and your excuse for being where you 
are. Neither did I find the West teeming with "charac- 
ters." I heard of them, and indeed the stories of this or 
that pioneer or desperado are really the most vivid and most 
interesting memories I have of the trip. But these men 
have been crowded out, or have become rich and respectably 
commonplace, or have been shot, as the case may be. 1 
met the men who had lynched them or who remembered 
them, but not the men themselves. They no longer over- 
run the country ; they disappeared with the buffalo, and the 
West is glad oi it, but it is disappointing to the visitor. 
The men I met were men of business, who would rather 
talk of the new court-house with the lines of the sod still 
showing around it than of the Indian fights and the killing 
of the bad men of earlier days when there was no court- 
house, and when the vigilance committee was a necessary 
evil. These were " well-posted " and " well-informed " cit- 
izens, and if there is one being I dread and fly from, it is 
a well-posted citizen. 

The men who are of interest in the West, and of whom 
most curious stories might be told, are the Eastern men 
and the Englishmen who have sought it with capital, or 
who have been driven there to make their fortunes. Some 
one once started a somewhat unprofitable inquiry as to 
what became of all the lost pins. That is not nearly so 
curious as what becomes of all the living men who drop 
suddenly out of our acquaintanceship or our lives, and who 
are not missed, but who are nevertheless lost. I know now 
what becomes of them; they all go West. I met some 
men here whom I was sure I had left walking Fifth Avenue, 
and who told me, on the contrary, that they had been m 



The Heart of the Great Divide 

the West for the last two years. They had once walked 
Fifth Avenue, but they dropped out of the procession one 
day, and no one missed them, and they are out here enjoy- 
ing varying fortunes. The brakesman on a freight and 
passenger train in Southern Texas was a lower-class man 
whom I remembered at Lehigh University as an expert 
fencer ; the conductor on the same train was from the 
same college town ; the part owner of a ranch, whom I sup- 
posed I had left looking over the papers in the club, told 
me he had not been in New York for a year, and that his 
partner was " Jerry " Black, who, as I trust no one has for- 
gotten, was one of Princeton's half-backs, and who I should 
have said, had any one asked me, was still in Pennsylvania. 
Another man whom I remembered as a " society " re- 
porter on a New York paper, turned up in a white apron as 

a waiter at a hotel in . I was somewhat embarrassed 

at first as to whether or not he would wish me to recognize 
him, but he settled my doubts by w^inking at me over his 
heavily-loaded tray, as much as to say it was a very good 
joke, and that he hoped I was appreciating it to its full 
value. We met later in the street, and he asked me with 
the most faithful interest of those whose dances and din- 
ners he had once reported, deprecated a notable scandal 
among people of the Four Hundred which was filling the 
papers at that time, and said I could hardly appreciate the 
pity of such a thing occurring among people of his set. 
Another man, whom I had known very well in New York, 
turned up in San Antonio with an entirely new name, wife, 
and fortune, and verified the tradition which exists there 
that it is best before one grows to know a man too well, to 
ask him what was his name before he came to Texas. San 
Antonio seemed particularly rich in histories of those who 



The West from a Car -Window 

came there to change their fortunes, and who had changed 
them most completely. The English gave the most con- 
spicuous examples of these unfortunates-conspicuous m 
the sense that their position at home had been so good, and 
their habits of life so widely different. 

The proportion of young English gentlemen who are 
rouo-hing it in the West far exceeds that of the young 
Anrericans. This is due to the fact that the former have 
never been taught a trade or profession, and in conse- 
quence, when they have been cheated of the money they 
brought with them to invest, have nothing but their hands 
to help them, and so take to driving horses or branding 
cattle or digging in the streets, as one graduate of Oxford, 
sooner than write home for money, did in Denver. He is 
now teaching Greek and Latin in one of our colleges. The 
manner in which visiting Englishmen are robbed in the 
West, and the quickness with which some of them take the 
lesson to heart, and practise it upon the next Englishman 
who comes out, or upon the prosperous Englishman al- 
ready there, would furnish material for a book full of piti- 
ful stories. And yet one cannot help smiling at the wick- 
edness of some of these schemes. Three Englishmen, for 
example, bought, as-they supposed, thirty thousand Texas 
steers ; but the Texans who pretended to sell them the cat- 
tle drove the same three thousand head ten times around 
the mountain, as a dozen supers circle around the back- 
drop of a stage to make an army, and the Englishmen 
counted and paid for each steer ten times over. There was 
another Texan who made a great deal of money by ad- 
vertising to teach young men how to become cowboys, and 
who charged tiiem ten dollars a month tuition fee, and who 
set his pupils to work digging holes for fence-posts all over 



The Heart of the Great Divide 

the ranch, until they grew wise in their generation, and left 
him for some other ranch, where they were paid thirty dol- 
lars per month for doing the same thing. But in many in- 
stances it is the tables of San Antonio which take the great- 
er part of the visiting Englishman's money. One gentleman, 
who for some time represented the Isle of Wight in the 
Lower House, spent three modest fortunes in the San Anto- 
nio gambling -houses, and then married his cook, which 
proved a most admirable speculation, as she had a frugal 
mind, and took entire control of his little income. And 
when the Marquis of Aylesford died in Colorado, the only 
friend in this country who could be found to take the body 
back to England was his first-cousin, who at that time was 
driving a hack around San Antonio. We heard stories of 
this sort on every side, and we met faro-dealers, cooks, and 
cowboys who have served through campaigns in India or 
Egypt, or who hold an Oxford degree. A private in G 
troop. Third Cavalry, who was my escort on several scout- 
ing expeditions in the Garza outfit, was kind enough and 
quite able to tell me which club in London had the oldest 
wine-cellar, where one could get the best visiting-cards en- 
graved, and why the Professor of Ancient Languages at 
Oxford was the superior of the instructor in like studies at 
Cambridge. He did this quite unaffectedly, and in no way 
attempted to excuse his present position. Of course, the 
value of the greater part of these stories depends on the 
family and personality of the hero, and as I cannot give 
names, I have to omit the best of them. 

There was a little English boy who left San Antonio be- 
fore I had reached it, but whose name and fame remained 
behind him. He was eighteen years of age, and just out 
of Eton, where he had spent all his pocket-money in betting 



The West from a Car -Window 

on the races through commissioners. Gambling was his 
ruling passion at an age when ginger-pop and sweets ap- 
pealed more strongly to his contemporaries. His people 
sent him to Texas with four hundred pounds to buy an in- 
terest in a ranch, and furnished him with a complete outfit 
of London -made clothing. x\n Englishman who saw the 
boy's box told me he had noted the different garments 
packed carefully away, just as his mother had placed them, 
and each marked with his name. The Eton boy lost the 
four hundred pounds at roulette in the first week after his 
arrival in San Antonio, and pawned his fine clothes in the 
next to " get back." He lost all he ventured. At the end 
of ten days he was peddling fruit around the streets in his 
bare feet. He made twenty -five cents the first day, and car- 
ried it to the gambling-house where he had already lost his 
larger fortune, and told one of the dealers he would cut the 
cards with him for the money. The boy cut first, and the 
dealer won ; but the other was enough of a gambler to see 
that the dealer had stooped to win his last few pennies un- 
fairly. The boy's eyes filled up with tears of indignation. 

" You thief !" he cried, " you cheated me !" 

The dealer took his revolver from the drawer of the ta- 
ble, and, pointing it at his head, said : " Do you know what 
we do to people who use that word in Texas? We kill 
them !" 

The boy clutched the table with both hands and flung 
himself across it so that his forehead touched the barrel of 
the revolver. " You thief !" he repeated, and so shrilly that 
every one in the room heard him. " I say you cheated me !" 

The gambler lowered the trigger slowly and tossed the 
pistol back in the drawer. Then be picked up a ten-dollar 
gold piece and shoved it towards him. 



i 



The Heart of the Great Divide 

" Here," he said, " that 'II help take yoii home. You're 
too damned tough for Texas !" 

The other Englishmen in San Antonio filled out the sum 
and sent him back to England. His people are well known 
in London ; his father is a colonel in the Guards. 

The most notable Englishman who ever came to Texas 
was Ben Thompson ; but he arrived there at so early an age, 
and became so thoroughly Western in his mode of life, that 
Texans claim him as their own. 1 imagine, however, he 
always retained some of the traditions of his birthplace, as 
there is a story of his standing with his hat off to talk to 
an English nobleman, when Thompson at the time was the 
most feared and best known man in all Texas. The stories 
of his recklessness and ignorance of fear, and utter disre- 
gard of the value of others' lives as well as his own, are 
innumerable. A few of them are interesting and worth 
keeping, as they show the typical bad man of the highest 
degree in his different humors, and also as I have not dared 
to say half as much about bad men as I should have liked 
to do. Thompson killed eighteen men in different parts of 
Texas, and was for this made marshal of Austin, on the 
principle that if he must kill somebody, it was better to 
give him authority to kill other desperadoes than reputa- 
ble citizens. As marshal it was his pleasure to pull up his 
buggy across the railroad track just as the daily express 
train was about to start, and covering the engineer with his 
revolver, bid him hold the train until he was ready to move 
on. He would, then call some trembling acquaintance from 
the crowd on the platform and talk with him leisurely, un- 
til he thought he had successfully awed the engineer and 
established his authority. Then he would pick up his reins 
and drive on, saying to the engineer, " You needn't think, 



The West from a Car - Window 

sir, any corporation can hurry me." The position of the 
unfortunate man to whom he talked must have been most 
trying, with a locomotive on one side and a revolver on the 
other. 

One day a cowboy, who was a well-known bully and a 
would-be desperado, shot several bullet-holes through the 
high hat of an Eastern traveller who was standing at the 
bar of an Austin hotel. Thompson heard of this, and, pur- 
chasing a high hat, entered the bar-room. 

" I hear," he said, facing the cowboy, " that you are shoot- 
ing plug-hats here to-day ; perhaps you would like to take a 
shot at mine." He then raised his revolver and shot away 
the cowboy's ear. " I meant," he said, " to hit your tar; did 
I do it ?" The bully showed proof that he had. " Well, 
then," said the marshal, " get out of here ;" and catching 
the man by his cartridge-belt, he threw him out into the 
street, and so put an end to his reputation as a desperate 
character forever. 

Thompson was naturally unpopular with a certain class 
in the community. Two barkeepers who had a personal 
grudge against him, with no doubt excellent reason, lay in 
ambush for him behind the two bars of the saloon, which 
stretched along either wall. Thompson entered the room 
from the street in ignorance of any plot against him until 
the two men halted him with shot-guns. They had him so 
surely at their pleasure that he made no effort to reach his 
revolver, but stood looking from one to the other, and smil- 
ing grimly. But his reputation was so great, and their fear 
of him so actual, that both men missed him, although not 
twenty feet away, and with shot-guns in their hands. Then 
Thompson took out his pistol deliberately and killed them. 

A few years ago he became involved in San Antonio with 



The Heart of the Great Divide 

" Jack " Harris, the keeper of a gambling-house and variety 
theatre. Harris lay in wait for Thompson behind the swing- 
ing doors of his saloon, but Thompson, as he crossed the 
Military Plaza, was warned of Harris's hiding-place, and 
shot him through the door. He was tried for the murder, 
and acquitted on the ground of self-defence ; and on his re- 
turn to Austin was met at the station by a brass band and 
all the fire companies. Perhaps inspired by this, he re- 
turned to San Antonio, and going to Harris's theatre, then 
in the hands of his partner, Joe Foster, called from the gal- 
lery for Foster to come up and speak to him. Thompson 
had with him a desperado named King Fisher, and against 
him every man of his class in San Antonio, for Harris had 
been very popular. Foster sent his assistant, a very young 
man named Bill Sims, to ask Thompson to leave the place, 
as he did not want trouble. 

" I have come to have a reconciliation," said Thompson. 
" I want to shake hands with my old friend, Joe Foster. 
Tell him I won't leave till I see him, and I won't make a 
row." 

Sims returned with Foster, and Thompson held out his 
hand. 

" Joe," he said, " I have come all the way from Austin to 
shake hands with you. Let's make up, and call it off." 

" I can't shake hands with you, Ben," Foster said, "You 
killed my partner, and you know well enough I am jiot the 
sort to forget it. Now go, won't you, and don't make 
trouble." 

Thompson said he would leave in a minute, but they 
must drink together first. There was a bar in the gallery, 
which was by this time packed with men who had learned 
of Thompson's presence in the theatre, but Fisher and 

231 



The West from a Car - Window 

Thompson stood quite alone beside the bar. The marshal 
of Austin looked np and saw Foster's glass untouched 
before him, and said, 

"Aren't you drinking with me, Joe?" 

Foster shook his head. 

"Well, then," cried Thompson, "the man who won't 
drink with me, nor shake hands with me, fights me." 

He reached back for his pistol, and some one — a jury of 
twelve intelligent citizens decided it was not young Bill 
Sims — shot him three times in the forehead. They say you 
could have covered the three bullet-holes with a half-dollar. 
But so great was the desperate courage of this ruffian that 
even as he fell he fired, holding his revolver at his hip, and 
killing Foster, and then, as he lay on his back, with every 
nerve jerking in agony, he emptied his revolver into the 
floor, ripping great gashes in the boards about him. And 
so he died, as he would have elected to die, with his boots 
on, and with the report of his pistol the last sound to ring 
in his ears. King Fisher was killed at the same moment ; 
and the Express spoke of it the next morning as " A Good 
Night's Work." 

I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Sims at the gambling 
palace, which was once Harris's, then Foster's, and which is 
now his, and found him a jolly, bright-eyed young man of 
about thirty, with very fine teeth, and a most contagious 
laugh. He was just back from Dwight, and told us of a 
man who had been cured there, and who had gone away 
with his mother leaning on his arm, and what this man had 
said to them of his hopes for the future when he left ; and 
as he told it the tears came to his eyes, and he coughed, 
and began to laugh over a less serious story. I tried all the 
time to imagine him, somewhat profanely, I am afraid, as a 

238 



The Heart of the Great Divide 

young David standing np before this English giant, who 
had sent twoscore of other men out of the world, and to 
picture the glaring, crowded gallery, with the hot air and 
smoke, and the voice of the comic singer rising from the 
stage below, and this boy and the marshal of Austin facing- 
one another with drawn revolvers ; but it was quite impos- 
sible. 

There are a great many things one only remembers to 
say as the train is drawing out of the station, and which 
have to be spoken from the car window. And now that 
my train is so soon to start towards the East, I find there 
are many things which it seems most ungracious to leave 
unsaid. I should like to say much of the hospitality of the 
West. We do not know such hospitality in the East. A 
man brings us a letter of introduction there, and we put 
him up at the club we least frequently visit, and regret that 
he should have come at a time when ours is so particularly 
crowded with unbreakable engagements. It is not so here. 
One might imagine the Western man never worked at all, 
so entirely is his time yours, if you only please to claim it. 
And from the first few days of my trip to the last, this 
self-effacement of my hosts and eagerness to please accom- 
panied me wherever I went. It was the same in every 
place, whether in army posts or ranches, or among that 
most delightful coterie of the Denver Club " who never 
sleep," or on the border of ^fexico, where " Bob " Haines, 
the sheriff of Zepata County, Texas, before he knew who I 
or my soldier escort might be, and while we were still but 
dust -covered figures in the night, rushed into the house 
and ordered a dinner and beds for us, and brought out his 
last two bottles of beer. The sheriff of Zepata County, 
" who can shoot with both hands," need bring no letter of 

<» .241 



The West from a Car ~ Window 

introduction with liim if he will deign to visit me when lie 
comes to New York. And as for that Denver Clul) coterie, 
they already know that the New York clubs are also sup- 
plied with electric buttons. 

And now that it is at an end, I find it hard to believe 
that I am not to hear again the Indian girls laughing over 
their polo on the prairie, or the regimental band playing 
the men on to the parade, and that I am not to see the 
officers' wives watching them from the line at sunset, as 
the cannon sounds its salute and the flag comes fluttering 
down. 

And yet New York is not without its good points. 

If any one doubts this, let him leave it for three months, 
and do one-night stands at fourth-rate hotels, or live on al- 
kali water and bacon, and let him travel seven thousand miles 
over a country where a real-estate office, a Citizen's Bank, 
and Quick Order Restaurant, with a few surrounding houses, 
make, as seen from the car window, a booming city, where 
beautiful scenery and grand mountains are separated by 
miles of prairie and chaparral, and where there is no Diana 
of the Tower nor bronze Farragut to greet him daily as he 
comes back from work through Madison Square. He will 
then feel a love for New York equal to the Chicagoan's love 
for his city, and when he sees across the New Jersey flats 
the smoke and the tall buildings and the twin spires of the 
cathedral, he will wish to shout, as the cowboys do when 
they " come into town," at being back again in the only 
place where one can both hear the Tough Girl of the East 
Side ask for her shoes, and the horn of the Country Club's 
coach tooting above the roar of the Avenue. 

The West is a very wonderful, large, unfinished, and out- 
of-doors portion of our country, and a most delightful place 

242 



The Heart of the Great Divide 

to visit. I would advise every one in the East to visit it, 
and I liope to revisit it myself. Some of those who go will 
not only visit it, but will make their homes there, and the 
course of empire- will eventually Westward take its way. 
But wlien it does, it will leave one individual behind it 
clinging- closely to the Atlantic seaboard. 

Little old New York is good enough for him. 



THE END 



Ji^dni 



^^-^^ 














.^'\ 








,0 -^^ 










-> -*o 












N^ 






^. 









.A 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




016 092 952 2 



